A Life of Grace and Hidden Struggles
The world has known her face, and her name, since the 1950s, when she became one of Hollywood’s most iconic actresses of all time. But away from the cameras, few knew the real Audrey Hepburn, the charming leading lady of classic films Roman Holiday, My Fair Lady and Breakfast at Tiffany’s and her secret past.
Her eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, was one of those few lucky people, and in his new biography, Intimate Audrey, he shares her magic – and her personal heartaches – with the rest of the world.
While her fans fondly remember her as one of the golden era’s brightest stars, he knew her as a normal mum.
“One of the greatest gifts she gave me, and subsequently my brother Luca, was not letting us grow up in that environment. She really gave up ‘Hollywood’ to be a full-time mum in a country home, making jams and fetching us at school,” Sean, 65, says.
“She was a mum who went through the war, who suffered, who knew the value of work, of a dollar, and made you finish your plate.”
From War to Hollywood
Audrey’s journey to stardom is more than an ordinary rags-to-riches story. As a schoolgirl in Nazi-occupied Netherlands, she saw unspeakable horrors during World War II – a traumatic time her son describes as her “early years of hardship and heartbreak”.
Sean reveals that the war contributed to his famous mother’s upright pose – during an air raid a piece of shrapnel landed in her neck and permanently caused the restriction.
“What she never told anyone until a few years before her death was that a small piece of shrapnel embedded itself in her neck,” Sean writes. “She confided to a friend, ‘It left me so I can’t bend my neck in the ways other people can. Promise not to tell anyone as long as I’m alive!’”
In a storyline that reads straight from an action film, Audrey bravely became a spy for the Dutch resistance. “By the time Holland was liberated, she had seen men executed before her eyes,” Sean writes. “She had risked her life over and over again by working for the Resistance.”
It’s hard to believe that just a few years later, ballet-trained Audrey had made her mark in the movies and won an Oscar for her breakout role in Roman Holiday. However, despite the industry accolades, Sean insists the professional role she cherished most was serving as a Unicef Goodwill Ambassador until her death in 1993.
Humanitarian Work
“She always talked about her Unicef years as her second and most important career. I think all of it was very meaningful to her in the sense that she really took it seriously,” he said of her humanitarian missions, which took her to Ethiopia, Venezuela, Vietnam and many other countries.
“She wasn’t just a celebrity who showed up and was given a memo.”
Though she knew great success in her working life, her love-life was in tatters. After divorcing Sean’s actor dad, Mel Ferrer, she fell for Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti and they married in 1969.
She suffered a series of miscarriages before welcoming son Luca, but it was Andrea’s promiscuous ways that eventually led to her accidental overdose of sleeping tablets and their divorce.
“Sitting me down, my mother said, ‘I know what this looks like, Sean, but please try to understand. I was in so much pain that I desperately wanted to knock myself out,’” he writes.
“‘I overdid it with the Mogadon, that’s all. I’ve been hurting too much and needed it to stop. I’m so dreadfully sorry. I never meant to take my life.’”
Beloved Mother
Recollecting his time with Audrey right until the very end, Sean documents saying farewell to his beloved mother at La Paisible, her home in Switzerland, and the outpouring of love from the public. The actress passed away at the age of 63, from a rare form of abdominal cancer.
“The effect she had on people really hit us when we carried her coffin from the church to her grave, gazing in wonder at all the people crowded at the roadside or standing like silent sentinels in the vineyards, weeping openly,” he writes.
“That was an extraordinary sight.”
