Audrey Hepburn’s hidden heartbreak: new biography reveals personal woes | UK | News

Hollywood star, enduring style icon, and dedication to humanity, Audrey Hepburn continues to be known around the world for all three. But the Breakfast at Tiffany’s actor had his fourth and perhaps biggest role; as a defender of female individuality in an age of conformist ostentation.

“There were Hollywood women wearing puffy dresses, with big, curled and combed hair, with black trousers, black sweaters and flat shoes,” says journalist Wendy Holden, who co-wrote the star’s first authorized biography with Audrey’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer.

“She was a feminist icon beyond her time. She made it normal for us to cut our hair short and not wear stilettos.”

Such was Audrey’s fame, both on and off screen, that 30 years after her death, it’s hard to imagine there’s anything new to learn about the woman who was the subject of more than 1,000 books and counting.

But when Sean asked Wendy to help him uncover the real woman behind the façade, flaws and all, she had her own explanation to tell: a deeply buried family secret unknown to the world.

It described the moment Sean, then 17, arrived at her home in Switzerland to discover that Audrey had taken a near-fatal overdose following the traumatic breakdown of Sean’s second marriage to her stepfather, Italian psychiatrist-neurologist Andrea Dotti.

Speaking ahead of the release of Intimate Audrey, Wendy says: “We were both really grappling with whether to reveal such a painful and personal part of Audrey’s past, something that had been kept secret for so long, which was a miracle considering the Roman paparazzi were following her every move.”

“I knew this could potentially damage Sean’s reputation, which he had worked so hard to maintain since his death, but he was determined to tell Sean’s full story and if this was to be a definitive biography chronicling his entire life, it had to be included, no matter how difficult it was.”

Audrey’s 12-year marriage to Dotti was tumultuous due to his infidelity, which was frequently reflected in the newspapers, to her humiliation. Wendy believes she stood by director Mel Ferrer’s son Sean in part because she didn’t want him and his half-brother, Dotti’s son Luca, to become the product of a broken family.

She remembers being shocked by Sean’s statement. “He came home from school to find Audrey’s maid Giovanna’s mother unresponsive and just staring at the bed.

“Audrey later told him that she didn’t want to end her own life, that she was so tired of everything that was going on and just wanted to sleep. “She overdosed on sleeping pills anyway and had to be transported to hospital to have her stomach pumped.

“Sean is very protective of Audrey’s legacy, dedicating his life to protecting and perpetuating her, but he felt that this story needed to be told. So many women identify with and adore Audrey, and we both felt it was right to finally show her vulnerability and pain, that she was human and authentic, that she wasn’t perfect like she was on the big screen.”

Before becoming a successful author, Wendy spent almost two decades as a war and foreign correspondent.

“I think Sean asked me to co-write the book with him because I saw and experienced a lot of the things that Audrey did when she was a UNICEF ambassador; I wrote about World War II and understood what she went through as a child in a Nazi-occupied country, and also what she went through later in life in refugee camps in war-torn countries,” she says.

She remembers growing up, watching Audrey’s films on a Sunday afternoon and being thrilled by their lightness and sparkling joy. The actress played a runaway princess in Roman Holiday, an eccentric socialite in Breakfast At Tiffany’s, a nun struggling with her faith in The Nun’s Story, a Cockney flower seller in My Fair Lady, and a bookstore clerk in Funny Face.

However, it was only during her conversations with Sean that Wendy learned that underneath her animated performances was “a sadness for Audrey that she had carried with her since childhood.”

The book details a painful childhood in the occupied Netherlands during the Second World War and how Audrey, the daughter of an aristocratic Dutch mother and a British merchant, suffered from severe malnutrition along with 20,000 Dutch people who starved to death during the Nazi occupation.

The famine of the winter of 1944-1945, known as the Hunger Winter in the Netherlands, saw Audrey barely survive on the aid of hot water and remained in bed to preserve what little energy she had left.

As he said: “Going without food, fearing for one’s life, bombings and other things made me grateful for the security and freedom in the sense that bad experiences became positive in my life.”

Wendy believes it was the star’s shaping war experiences that turned him into a humanitarian.

“Audrey, like many people in the 1930s, was shocked to learn that her parents had been seduced by fascism and even met Hitler. [they posed for a photo with him]. “I’m sure he was embarrassed by his parents’ previous association with fascism and spent the rest of his life working for the opposite: to fight oppression.”

Long after her film career ended, Audrey would draw on her own experience of wartime oppression to fiercely defend those living under hostile regimes in war-torn countries. The book reveals for the first time how he helped a Vietnamese family escape forced labor during the Vietnam War. The father was a Vietnamese diplomat in Rome and the son Bang were very close friends of Sean.

When they were sent back to the South and forced to live under communism, Bang wrote three identical letters to Audrey and sent them to the UN, UNICEF, and the American Embassy.

“By some miracle one of the letters reached him and he set about rescuing the whole family and taking them to France,” says Wendy. “There was no publicity or fanfare, just Audrey remembering a little boy in Rome many years ago who had befriended her son and wanted to help. He had no ego.”

Audrey’s childhood experiences also shaped her approach to motherhood. “Her father abandoned her when she was a child, and her mother was harsh and distant, whereas Audrey was the opposite towards her own children,” says Wendy.

“She would stay in the marriage if she could for the sake of her sons. Being a good mother was everything to her, and her closeness to Sean in particular was evident from the time I spent with her.”

Sean writes about Audrey: “I realized my mother was a lioness. She was soft and strong at the same time and had such kind hearts.”

Wendy says that although both marriages ended in extremely difficult and public ways, Audrey did her best to make sure both of her sons had a good relationship with their father. In fact, both her ex-husbands were at her home in Switzerland when she died of a rare form of abdominal cancer on January 20, 1993, at the age of 63.

Sean was finally with her and remembers their last conversation in the book. “He says he can see the children he couldn’t save in the refugee camps and they’re okay now,” he writes.

There are many touching personal moments like this that will delight Hepburn fans young and old. They contain the story of Audrey’s famous grace and poise.

The actress wanted to be a ballet dancer from a young age, but the war meant she missed years of training. After winning a scholarship to the prestigious Rambert Ballet School, she moved to London, but was told she wasn’t strong enough to do it professionally, so she broke into films as a chorus girl.

But it turns out that Audrey’s upright stance and grace aren’t just about her dance training. “He didn’t want anyone to know, but during the war he got shrapnel in his neck and it affected the way he moved his head and neck,” Wendy says.

In the book, Sean explains that his mother’s image was so ubiquitous everywhere, from books and magazines to new items, that he often played the “three minutes to find grandma” game with his children to spend time in public when they were little.

Now Wendy is playing the game too. “He may have died over 20 years ago, but his image is still everywhere,” he smiles. “Like Sean and his kids, I find myself searching for him everywhere I go.”

● Intimate Audrey: The Authorized Biography of Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden (HarperNonFiction, £25) is out now; to buy wendyholden.com or all good bookstores