12/31/2022 0 Comments Man of steel and velvetI’ve heard her described as a steel fist in a velvet glove.”ĭid it make her fearless? “No. “It gave her a steely determination, a respect for what it takes to do it. If she had an eating disorder, I never knew about it.” He adds that her wartime experiences left Hepburn with an armour-plated resilience. “She could eat everyone in our family under the table, and she was a wonderful cook. Ferrer laughs off the suggestion she was anorexic. “She used to tell me: ‘We spent days in bed with all our clothes on because blankets were not enough.” As an adult, Hepburn was so thin people often assumed that she had an eating disorder – she weighed 48kg (7st 7lb) all her life. Hepburn went for days without food and the family ate tulip bulbs to survive. In the freezing winter of 1944, the Germans left the Dutch to starve. ![]() But having heard the stories, and I don’t know this for a fact, I’m sure she was sheltered from the contents of those letters.” “To protect her, I’m not sure she was told to what extent the messages were important,” says Ferrer. Like many Dutch children, Hepburn did her bit, too, carrying messages hidden in her shoes, says Ferrer, who has written a biography of his mother and recently published a book for children about her life in wartime, co-authored with his wife Karin. ![]() ![]() Van Heemstra had by this time renounced fascism and worked with the resistance in the Netherlands. “It haunted her for the rest of her life,” says Ferrer. She saw Jewish women and children loaded into wagons. Her uncle was among the Dutchmen rounded up and shot. Hepburn spent the second world war with her mother in the Netherlands under Nazi occupation. Hepburn with her son Sean not long after filming Breakfast at Tiffany’s. “My mother absolutely loathed it.” There is no evidence for the story that Hepburn’s parents lunched with Hitler, however: “That’s a how-to-sell-10,000-more-books Hollywood rumour.” Did Hepburn feel ashamed about their politics? “More than ashamed, she was angry,” Ferrer says. Ruston and Van Heemstra were both Nazi sympathisers and he was a friend of the English fascist Oswald Mosley. My father leaving left me insecure for life.” Ruston barely managed a visit when his daughter was sent to boarding school in Kent. He finally walked for good in 1935, moving back to England, a moment Hepburn describes in the film as “the first big blow of my life. Hepburn was born in Belgium in 1929, the daughter of Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a minor Dutch aristocrat, and Joseph Ruston, an Englishman who mostly absented himself from family life. You have to fight in Hollywood for every little bit, and she did. Speaking on Zoom from his home in Italy, Hepburn’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, says his mother’s steeliness is often overlooked. Now a new documentary, Audrey, gives us a more complex picture of the woman.ĭirected by Helena Coan, the film features never-before-seen archive footage of Hepburn alongside intimate interviews with her family and friends. ![]() But somehow, the “smart”, “talented” and “ambitious” woman Wyler described never makes it into the books about her enduring charm with titles such as How to Be Lovely: The Audrey Hepburn Way. For decades, Hepburn has been adored for her graceful beauty and style. She got the part, won an Oscar and the rest is history. “V ery alert, very smart, very talented, very ambitious.” That was the director William Wyler’s verdict after watching a screen test for Roman Holiday by a young chorus girl called Audrey Hepburn in 1951.
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