Audrey Hepburn The World's Most Photographed

In September 1944,

a young girl set out on a dangerous secret mission in war-torn Holland.

The battle to liberate Arnhem was at its height.

Working for the Dutch Resistance, the girl was trying to out-wit the Nazis

and take a message to a stranded British airman.

In the woods outside the city, she found the British paratrooper and quickly traded information.

But on her way home, her luck ran out.

A German soldier stopped her.

She had to hold her nerve at all costs.

If the Germans discovered her true purpose, she'd be arrested and shot.

Looking at her ID photograph, the soldier would have seen little more than a child.

The girl coolly played the innocent.

A born actress, she was also a born survivor.

The girl in the photograph would grow up to be one of the world's most enigmatic Hollywood stars,

Audrey Hepburn.

I am a very stylish girl.

How do I look?

Throughout the 1950s and 60s, images of Audrey Hepburn dazzled the world.

One of the most popular actresses of her time - she was more than just a Hollywood movie star.

Waif-like, refined, and worldly, she was also a new kind of fashion icon.

Hepburn became famous for her cool, composed and stylish image.

But few people were aware of the childhood experience of terror

and loss hidden beneath the surface of her enchanting smile.

There is an extraordinary difference between the pictures of her as an adult and of a child.

There is a great innocent trusting quality

and the guilelessness,

that wonderful smile always remained on the face

but it took on facets of fragility and wistfulness.

The soul was always on her face.

Audrey Hepburn was born on 4th May 1929

to an Anglo-Irish businessman, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston

and Ella van Heemstra, an impoverished Dutch Baroness.

Her parents came from very different backgrounds but they shared the same political beliefs.

Her father was a British Fascist.

He was a member of the Union of British Fascists,

he was an admirer of Oswald Moseley

and he was a rather dreadful person.

As fascism spread through Europe, Hepburn's parents were involved in

fund-raising and recruitment for the cause.

In May 1935, Joseph Hepburn-Ruston walked out on his family.

The young Audrey was devastated.

Audrey stated that her father leaving the family,

had left a bigger mark on her than anything else in her life because,

in effect, it felt like she had been deserted. She never quite overcame that.

This is one of only a few photographs ever taken of Audrey with her father before he left.

Gently holding his hand, her smile untroubled and innocent,

this was a picture she would keep with her for the rest of her life.

In September 1939, as war broke out, Audrey's mother fatefully decided

it would be safer to take her home to Holland.

On May 10th 1940, German troops advanced across the Dutch border.

In just five days, Holland was crushed.

Photos taken at the beginning of the war show a family that would be torn apart by the Nazis.

Some were forced into hiding,

and her uncle was shot for plotting against the Germans.

Audrey's mother's support for fascism crumbled and within weeks she too had decided to join the Resistance.

Audrey also threw herself into the struggle.

Little Audrey managed to contribute in her way to the Dutch resistance movement.

Of course the Nazi's confiscated cars and kept close watch on adults, but kids were allowed to keep

their bicycles so she could bike back and forth and take messages here and there to people.

As well as delivering messages, Audrey was also dancing and acting

in fundraising performances for the resistance, right under the nose of the Nazis.

This photo, taken in 1940, captures her in one of her first acting roles.

The performances of course would have to be held in the dark with all the curtains shut

so the Germans wouldn't know what was going on and no-one was allowed to applaud,

and the wonderful statement Hepburn made was that the performances

she loved and remembered most in her life were those for which the ending was greeted by no applause at all.

But the Nazis were stepping up their efforts to catch spies.

The stakes were rising in Audrey's game of subterfuge.

When she came face to face with the soldier in September 1944,

she knew she was risking her life.

She was performing the role of a perfectly nice, harmless girl,

and gets off scot free with what might have been her first great performance.

Audrey had survived.

But there was worse to come.

The last terrible winter of the war was known in Holland as 'the Hunger Winter'.

Literally, literally, every scrap of food had been removed from the town by the Germans.

And so there was nothing for the populous, and people were eating

tulip bulbs, grass, whatever you could find and many died.

Like many children, Audrey suffered jaundice, anaemia

and a chronic blood disorder, all diseases caused by malnutrition.

On the verge of starvation, Audrey spent the last month

of the war hiding from the Nazis at home in the cellar.

When Arnhem was liberated in April 1945, Audrey tasted her first proper food in months.

She would never forget the joy she experienced that day.

Right after the war,

I was one of thousands of very hungry youngsters

and not all that well,

through malnutrition of many years,

and it was UNICEF

that came in with food packages and I opened up a can of condensed milk and ate the lot.

The young Audrey had narrowly escaped death by starvation.

But her body would never fully recover from the infamous 'Hunger Winter'.

She was so weak that she had to even give up dancing,

which was particularly sad for her because she was hoping and wanting to be a ballet performer,

and when the war finally ended she found that she was probably not going to be able to dance any more.

Photographs of Audrey taken after the war show a smiling teenager,

eager to put the horrors of the past behind her.

But beneath the cheerful smile, her face now shows the vulnerability

which would one day captivate some of the greatest photographers in the world.

In 1948 Hepburn moved to London and found work performing in cabaret in the West End.

She was just another girl in the chorus line, but photographers were already drawn to her,

and she was selected to appear in many of the publicity stills.

A casting director soon picked Hepburn out from all the other dancers for her first small role

in a British movie, Laughter in Paradise.

Hello.

-Who wants a Tiggie?

-Hello sweetie.

Right from the start, Hepburn was cast in a series of frivolous comedies,

a world away from the horrors of her recent experience.

Again.

Then in October 1950,

her past began to catch up with her.

Her first significant role was as a young ballerina in The Secret People,

a dark thriller about two sisters caught up in wartime resistance.

In the process of filming this, the director told her that what she should do

was to channel some of her own experiences

from being a young girl who wanted to be a ballet dancer, in hiding in World War Two.

She did channel that, and it was very painful.

No... Oh!

Audrey Hepburn would never again agree to play a role

that drew directly on her harrowing wartime experience.

The blood, it won't stop!

But her memories of the war would help to secure her spectacular debut in Hollywood.

In 1951 Paramount Pictures auditioned her for the leading role in the romantic comedy, Roman Holiday.

During the screen test, she was again reminded of the time in her life she wanted to forget.

Now, tell us about the war.

I did give performances to

collect money for the Underground, which always needed money.

What about the Germans, what did they do about it?

They didn't know about it.

In trying to laugh off her past, Audrey had given a glimpse

of the playful, strong-willed but vulnerable quality that director William Wyler was looking for.

He was convinced he had found his star.

She's a princess, she's beautiful, and confidentially, she's a pixie.

This enigmatic combination would become Audrey Hepburn's signature.

Loved by audiences, producers and photographers.

Hollywood photographer, Bob Willoughby was assigned to photograph

Hepburn on the marathon publicity shoot for Roman Holiday.

He would never forget the first moment he saw her.

Out comes from the dressing room, this girl all in white voile, a beautiful young lady.

And I thought, "Oh, boy," cos I hadn't seen the film,

I don't think anyone had at that point had seen the film

and I thought, "that's something else!"

When I look at children, there's an innocence about them

that hasn't been corrupted, and the beauty Audrey has was quite like that.

When the shoot was finally over Hepburn was exhausted, but Willoughby

couldn't stop taking shots of her, even as she was leaving the studios.

It was like getting out of school for her and so she's bouncing along the street and I followed her.

And I said, "Can I come back to your hotel?"

Willoughby was fascinated by the charming new star.

He followed her taxi back to the hotel and persuaded her to let him take a few more informal shots.

She was very gracious. I helped her carry her clothes back to her hotel room.

I have pictures of her

on the bed reading a letter.

And I put her in the window, and she had some azaleas.

I love those pictures.

Willoughby was hooked.

He became one of Audrey Hepburn's most trusted photographers, working with her for the rest of her life.

He would eventually get close enough to capture the inner sadness behind her enigmatic eyes.

Audrey Hepburn's debut performance in Roman Holiday won her an Oscar.

Within ten years of starving in the cellar in Arnhem, she had conquered Hollywood.

With the new star came a new look.

Hepburn's sophisticated yet childlike persona and boyish figure,

redefined the Hollywood standards of beauty.

Her physique was characterised first of all, of course,

by her great thinness, and secondly by the fact that she was very small-chested,

which went totally against the vogue of the day,

which was full-bosomed and blonde.

There was Jayne Mansfield, there was Marilyn Monroe -

the very obvious big American women.

I think Audrey became role model because she offered them an alternative.

It was another way of dressing,

another way that a woman could present herself

in a beautiful way to the world.

Few people had any idea that Audrey Hepburn owed her world famous figure

to the long-term effects of war time starvation.

By the mid 50s, Hepburn was one of the most photographed women in the world.

And Hollywood had fallen in love.

She was repeatedly cast as the vulnerable young girl

in search of a father figure to take care of her.

Humphrey Bogart in Sabrina,

Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon,

and Fred Astaire in Funny Face.

Please sit down.

Leave me alone!

This was harmless escapism for both the audience and the star.

But Hepburn's childhood suffering was never far from the surface.

She hadn't seen her real father for 20 years.

In 1954, Hepburn married one of her older leading men, the actor and director Mel Ferrer.

Bob Willoughby captured some of their intimate moments together on the set of Green Mansions.

There's a picture of them, she's going to make up and he's going

to look at rushes or something, and they're holding hands until...

they're...just the fingers, their arms are reaching out, they didn't wanna leave each other.

I think being deserted by her father left her with the fear that anyone that she loved might leave her.

It made her uncertain about life.

Willoughby's photographs reveal an air of melancholy

that the public would never see, a private Audrey still struggling with the void left by her father.

She was sad, a little wistful. There were times she was alone, she felt.

And there's pictures of her sitting alone on the sound stage, in all the greenery.

But that was the only time that I've ever seen this, this kind of inner light go out.

Hepburn had found out after the war that her father was living in Ireland.

Eventually, with her husband's support, she found the courage to contact him.

This photograph was taken on the day they met each other for the first time in over 20 years.

Hepburn grips her father's arm and smiles as if a lifetime of loss had been erased.

But once again, the smile for the camera struggles to conceal a deeper pain.

When she finally did see her father again,

he turned out to be so removed

she continued to feel that she did not have a father.

A photograph of Hepburn with someone else's father,

bears witness to another meeting, which would once again force her to face up to her past.

Director George Stevens was planning a film version of Anne Frank's Diary.

He thought Hepburn was ideal for the part of Anne Frank, but she had serious reservations.

It was just too emotional a thing for her to be able to do,

and she said, "We were both adolescent girls locked up in a few rooms,

"couldn't go outside, terrified all the time."

Claustrophobia, all the things that Anne Frank suffered and wrote about

so beautifully in her diaries were things that Audrey identified with.

Stevens pulled out all the stops to try to get her to take the part.

Finally, he even asked Anne Frank's father, Otto Frank to meet up with her and try to persuade her.

Hepburn still felt unable to overcome her fear of the role.

But she would always keep the photograph of their meeting on her dressing table,

alongside the one of her own father.

Having turned her back on her tragic past once more, Hepburn threw herself

into another romantic comedy, playing the role of a New York society prostitute.

If you know the story by Truman Capote, it's actually a pretty rough story about a prostitute

and hustling and trying to pay her rent and so on.

But then Audrey got the role and they made a movie out of it and she became like,

the romantic prostitute, the prostitute who wore Givenchy.

Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, who typifies and glorifies the glamorous playmates

of the glitter and shimmer of New York as it has never been captured before.

Hepburn transformed the role of a prostitute into an image of goodness,

vulnerability and innocence.

Photographs of her as Holly Golightly would become her most enduring and defining image.

By the mid 60s, at the peak of her career, Audrey Hepburn could do no wrong.

But then she was offered the part of Eliza Doolittle in the musical My Fair Lady.

It was assumed it would go to Julie Andrews who created it on Broadway.

She was a great success, a beautiful singer.

But Jack Warner cast Audrey Hepburn and when they asked him why he said,

"because the difference between Julie Andrews and Audrey Hepburn is fifteen million dollars."

So Audrey Hepburn got the part.

The country is furious because Julie didn't get the role.

For the first time in her career, Hepburn found herself demonised by both critics and the public.

But photographer and designer, Cecil Beaton, was delighted with the casting of Audrey Hepburn.

He was transfixed by what he described as her young and sad eyes.

Beaton set out to photograph Hepburn in every one of the hundreds of

dresses he had designed for the production.

The session went on for 48 hours.

Beaton had never taken so many pictures in a single shoot

and ended up with a total of 350 exposures.

While Beaton organised his photo shoot like a military operation,

Bob Willoughby was taking some more informal photographs.

# All I want is a room somewhere

# Far away from the cold night air

# With one enormous chair

# Oh wouldn't it be lovely... #

Willoughby unwittingly captured a defining shot

of one of the most difficult episodes in Hepburn's career.

The photograph of her singing to the playback,

you can see in the background the cameras being set up for the next shot,

and you can see in the left foreground the sound engineer playing the Luverly track,

and she's lip-syncing to the pre-recorded music.

# I would never budge till spring... #

Meanwhile behind her back, Warner and the studio

are whispering amongst themselves, "She can't do it, we have to have her dubbed."

But they didn't tell Audrey

and finally Audrey finds out and gets mad, gets upset, of course, as she would.

My Fair Lady was the best of roles and the worst of roles that Audrey Hepburn ever played.

# Loverly, loverly... #

I must say I take my hat off to all the marvellous people in Hollywood

who can twiddle all the knobs and make one voice out of two.

I guess that it must be your voice in Just You Wait, Henry Higgins.

Yes, quite a lot of it.

And maybe the higher soprano was one where you got a little help?

That's right because I'm not a soprano. I'm not a singer.

But Hepburn was again trying to hide her true feelings.

She was hurt and disappointed when the film won Oscar nominations

in all major categories apart from one - Best Actress.

That year's winner?

Julie Andrews for her performance in Mary Poppins.

Hepburn was tired.

And the fragility of her slender physique was now beginning to take its toll.

Before she started that film she rested for two months just to get her health back.

And there were times that she wasn't scheduled to do any close-up

photography because it would show in her face, she was that sensitive.

I mean, she was fragile.

Behind the scenes, her relationship with Mel Ferrer was also in trouble.

After 14 years of marriage and eight years after the birth of their son Sean,

they divorced in 1968.

Hepburn now retreated from the snapping cameras of Hollywood for some rest and privacy.

She married Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti in 1969

and had a second son, Luca, a year later.

Her second marriage didn't last but in 1979, she met the Dutch actor Robert Wolders.

Someone who knew exactly what she had been through as a child.

Well, ironically Audrey and I lived not more than half an hour away from each other during the war years,

occupied Holland.

We talked a great deal about our common past.

We realised that the occupation had left certain...marks on us.

A certain type of ironic humour that we both had,

which again harked back to the war years where we

managed to somehow find humour

in the most dreadful of situations.

Hepburn was coming to terms with her past.

The girl in the wartime ID photo had been on a remarkable journey.

She had been photographed every step of the way.

But the photograph she would love best of all was yet to be taken.

In 1988, Hepburn became Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Children's Fund UNICEF.

On her first mission to Ethiopia she met UNICEF photographer John Isaac.

She knew what suffering was all about,

she had felt it and that showed in her pictures and her reactions.

For Audrey, she didn't mind the flies,

she didn't mind what kind of disease they carried

or whatever problems they had, she was there to help them.

Her partner, Robert Wolders, travelled with her across the world.

Audrey was touched by the role that UNICEF had played in her life at the end of the war.

She understood the hunger that food cannot satisfy, the emotional hunger that the child has.

When you see some of the photographs that John took and that I took,

you'll see that she is constantly mobbed by children, be it in the Sudan or in Bangladesh.

And this is what happens if you learn to read and write.

There's one photograph.

It's a group of Bangladeshi children surrounding her,

and I think at least half a dozen somehow are touching her.

On returning from what would be her final UNICEF trip to Somalia in 1992, Hepburn was diagnosed with cancer.

On 20th January 1993, she died at the age of 63.

Of all of the pictures taken of Audrey Hepburn

she said this was her favourite.

It's a photograph which shows a face that no longer had anything to hide.

She was in the midday sun and she was carrying

this little girl on her back, and I'd shot with a flash you know.

So you can see all her wrinkles.

An American photo magazine wanted to do a special issue on celebrities favourite pictures.

So I called her and I said, Audrey, they're asking whether they could do

a little bit of airbrushing, do you want that to be done?

So right away she said, "Hey Johnny, don't.

"Tell them not to mess with my face, I earned every one of those wrinkles."

# Moon River

# Wider than a mile

# I'm crossing you in style someday

# Oh, dream maker

# You heartbreaker

# Wherever you're going

# I'm going your way... #