Audrey Hepburn, the anti-celeb celebrity

Audrey Hepburn was a true cosmopolitan (or “citizen of nowhere”) who lived variously in Belgium, France, England, America, Switzerland and Spain. She spoke several languages. She was glamorous and compassionate, stylish but not avaricious, successful but not cutthroat. A symbol of a bygone era of European cooperation and a celebrity culture that was more about glamour and mystery than our contemporary transactional celebrity.

Descended from European aristocracy, Hepburn’s life was bookended by war and hunger, beginning with a dangerous childhood in occupied Holland during the second world war and ending with her tireless work as a Unicef goodwill ambassador nursing starving children in Ethiopia and Sudan in the 1990s.

In the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, she lived on the point of starvation and had to hide in basements. Her English accent made her a potential target for roaming German soldiers, and she remembered being chased through the backstreets.

Despite the obvious dangers, Hepburn was brave and rebellious, delivering messages for the Dutch resistance. She also performed at secret soirees, where audiences paid to watch dancers, actors and musicians do turns in people’s living rooms, the blackout blinds drawn so as not to alert patrolling soldiers. Audrey danced in honour of her heroine Margot Fonteyn and had her first taste of fame with an audience who could not applaud: “Instead of clapping, the audience just smiled in the dark.”

If the story of crouching undetected in basements and attics sounds familiar, Audrey herself grew up mere streets away from Anne Frank, a girl of the same age. In fact, Anne’s father – and the only surviving member of the Frank family – visited Audrey in Switzerland to beg her to take the part of Anne in the first biopic made about her. Audrey was charmed by Otto but could not imagine portraying the child whose life, and death, might so easily have been hers. “I couldn’t play my sister’s life,” she said. “It’s too close.’’

As a lifelong fan, I’ve read many of the avalanche of books about Hepburn. This – Intimate Audrey – is the second written by Sean, her son with her first husband, Mel Ferrer. It is warm and funny, kind and compassionate, and full of love and empathy for his mother. It tells a private story focusing on snippets of conversation and moments away from the spotlight. Hepburn shunned a starry life except when filming and preferred to live in the European countryside.

Sean writes: “By establishing a home in Switzerland my mother was rebelling against Hollywood, in her own quiet way. She refused to live in Tinseltown or flaunt her standing in an ostentatious way. Living in the heart of Europe, far from the glitz, she preferred walking her dogs or arranging flowers while listening to jazz to attending galas and premieres.”

Hepburn certainly faced all of the struggles a woman might in Hollywood at this time, or that a working mother might experience at any time. Unusually, Ferrer is sensitive to this in a way that some children of stars find difficult, often foregrounding their own disgruntlement above the very real struggles faced by a mother trying to balance family life with a career.

Hepburn, in fact, seems to have proceeded without ego in this respect, feeling just as guilty for letting down collaborators and co-stars as she did her children and husband. But her clear love of her family, friends and her home life is central here.

Although this is a homage to her humanitarianism and an insight into her delicate emotional life and sensibility, style and fashion is not neglected. She is often remembered as removing all embellishments to costumes and garments, preferring a sleek silhouette, a refined palette and one stand-out accessory, and those eyes! In fact, her attitude to fashion was formed by those early years in which she owned only a pair of slacks, a dress and a couple of blouses, when she would add a wild flower, a second-hand scarf or a wide belt to refine her look and hide her semi-starved body.