Musicians - Audrey Hepburn

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > Audrey Hepburn

	Musicians - Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn (May 4, 1929 – January 20, 1993) was a British actress, fashion model and humanitarian. Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in Brussels, Belgium, she was the only child of Joseph Anthony Ruston, an Anglo-Irish banker, and Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch aristocrat descended from French and English kings. Her father later appended the name Hepburn to his surname, and Audrey became Audrey Hepburn-Ruston. She had two half-brothers, Alexander and Ian Quarles van Ufford, by her mother's first marriage to a Dutch nobleman.

Far from being merely a beautiful woman, Hepburn was humble, kind, witty and charming, and she lived the philosophy of putting others before herself. She showed this side particularly towards the end of her life in her tireless work for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).

Life During World War Two

Hepburn attended private schools in England and the Netherlands. Her father left the family when Audrey was young, at what she called the most traumatic moment of her life (years later she would locate her father and send him money). After the 1935 divorce of her parents, she was living with her mother at Arnhem, Netherlands when the German invasion and occupation of World War II occurred. At that time she adopted the pseudonym Edda Van Heemstra, modifying her mother's documents to do so, because an "English-sounding" name was considered dangerous. This was never her legal name.

After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day, things grew worse under the German occupiers. During the Dutch famine over the winter of 1944, brutality increased and the Nazis confiscated the Dutch people's limited food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat in their homes, or food to eat, people in the Netherlands starved and froze to death in the streets, particularly so in Arnhem, which was devastated during Operation Market Garden. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed several health problems. She would stay in bed and read to take her mind off the hunger, and she danced ballet for groups of people to collect money for the underground movement. She resorted to digging up and eating Tulip bulbs to survive the famine. The impact of these times would shape her life and values.

Rise to Stardom

After the war, Hepburn and her mother moved to London, where she studied ballet, worked as a model, and in 1951, began acting in films, mostly in minor or supporting roles as Audrey Hepburn. She got into acting mainly to make money so that her mother would not have to work menial jobs to support them. Her first major performance was in the 1951 film The Secret People, in which she played a ballet dancer. Audrey had trained in ballet since childhood and won critical acclaim for her talent, which she showcased in the film. However, her teachers had deemed her "too tall" to be a professional ballet dancer, since, at 5'7", she was taller than many of the male dancers. She was chosen to play the lead character in the Broadway play Gigi that opened on November 24, 1951. She won a Theatre World Award for her debut performance, and it had a successful six-month run in New York City.

She was then offered a starring role opposite Gregory Peck in the Hollywood motion picture, Roman Holiday. Peck saw her star quality and insisted she share top billing. For her performance, she won the 1953 Academy Award for Best Actress. Years later, when asked by Barbara Walters what her favorite film was, Hepburn answered without hesitation, Roman Holiday, because it was the one that made her a star.

After Roman Holiday she filmed Sabrina with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, with whom she had a brief romance. Many believe Holden considered Audrey to be the love of his life, and she would go on to appear with him again in the comedy Paris, When It Sizzles.

In 1954, Audrey went back to the stage playing the water sprite in Ondine in a performance with Mel Ferrer, whom she would wed later that year. For her performance in Ondine, Hepburn was awarded the Tony Award for Best Actress (1954) which, coming only six weeks after her academy award for Roman Holiday, solidified her reputation as both a film and stage star.

Having become one of Hollywood's most popular box-office attractions, Audrey Hepburn co-starred with other major actors such as Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon, George Peppard in Breakfast at Tiffany's, Cary Grant in the critically acclaimed hit Charade, Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady, Peter O'Toole in How to Steal a Million, and Sean Connery in Robin and Marian. Many of these leading men became very close to her. Rex Harrison called Audrey his favorite leading lady; Cary Grant said, "all I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn;" and Gregory Peck became a lifelong friend. Some believe Bogart and Hepburn did not get along, but this is untrue. Bogart got along better with Hepburn than anyone else on set; he later apologized to Billy Wilder for his behavior.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Audrey Hepburn ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Audrey Hepburn; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay