Audrey Hepburn

As they often say, everybody has their burden and hardships and you should never judge a book by its cover. When it comes to Audrey, her wonderful face, her rise to stardom, her beautiful clothes – you would not now that she really suffered as a kid. 

She is actually Belgian – not originally American or English as you would assume. Her father was a British tradesman and her mother was from Dutch nobility. It was the second marriage of Audrey’s mother Ella van Heemstra, so Audrey actually has two stepbrothers. Both of Audrey’s parents were with their then-partners in the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony that is today Indonesia. Ella in what is known today as Jakarta with her first husband and kids and Hepburn’s father Joseph Ruston in Semarang, the capital of Central Java. The two got married eventually in Batavia, today’s Jakarta. I know that colonisation is a really dark chapter in our European history, but still, it is fascinating, where people back then had been, had travelled to – it’s really different times back then. 

Audrey was born in Belgium, once her parents had relocated first back to London and then to Brussels, where her father was tasked with opening an office for the loan company he was working for. She had a really privileged upbringing with no money concerns and lots of travel between Brussels, where they were living, London because of the business of her father as well as The Hague and Arnhem due to family ties.

The hardest moment in Audrey’s life? When her father left the family when Audrey was only six years old. In her own words: “the most traumatic event of my life.” Children are so dependent on their parents, so I can only assume the heartbreak she must have felt and how traumatising it must have been to be abandoned by a parent. So, Audrey moved back to Arnhem to the estate of Ella’s family and was sent to Kent to receive private higher class education on her father’s commands.

Then, WW II came – and life changed forever. 

First, though, I have to mention that both of Audrey’s parents were supporting and collecting donations for the British Union of Fascists before they parted ways and when Ella met Adolph Hinter she wrote quite favourable articles about him. Which sends shivers up and down my spine. 

So, WWII started and Ella got Audrey back to Arnhem – because, remembering history lessons: The Netherlands stayed neutral during WWI and Ella was hoping the same would happen and they would come out of this war unscathed. Spoiler: Nope, didn’t happen. 

They lived through German occupation for five long years – 1940-1945. During this time, Audrey witnessed horrific and traumatic things, her uncle was executed based on fault accusations to make a point because he was really prominent in Dutch society. Her half brother Ian was deported to a labour camp and she witnessed the transportation of Dutch Jews to concentration camps, she saw kids who stepped on the trains who were her age or younger. Audrey supported the underground movement, the resistance, by doing silent  ballet performances for money and distributing underground papers as well as helping in hospitals that were at the heart of the resistance. Also the family apparently hid a British paratrooper – I think that this already shows what kind of a human Audrey Hepburn was – kind, caring, always doing the right thing. 

But worst of all was the famine in 1944. The Germans, in revenge for Dutch rebellion and railway blockages, reduced food and gas supplies and the Dutch even sorted to bake breads, cakes and biscuits out of tulip bulbs, which provided some starch. By the end of the siege, Audrey was dangerously malnourished and suffered from anaemia, jaundice, oedema and a dangerous respiratory infection. The thing that saved her? Her mother got sent thousands of cigarettes from a former British lover that she could trade on the Black market to get the medicine to save Audrey’s life. Because of the war, basically all properties and all the family fortune had been destroyed and they had nothing left. 

After the war, Audrey and her mom moved to Amsterdam and Audrey began training as a professional ballet dancer – something that she had already started when she was in boarding school in Britain and in Brussels for a short while before the war. She eventually moved to London when she accepted a scholarship to a famous ballet school in Notting Hill and supported herself with part-time work as a model. She eventually dropped ballet – she was told that she would never make it as a prima ballerina, despite her incredible talent, because, on the one hand she was already too tall, on the other hand she was too weak, frail and prone to sickness due to the severe malnutrition she suffered during the war. So, Audrey turned to acting instead and had some minor roles in a couple of British movies. And then, it was time for Monte Carlo Baby, that is actually a bilingual film from 1952 that was filmed in Monte Carlo. And then there luck struck for Audrey. Writer Colette stayed at the same hotel and was so enamoured with Audrey that she insisted she should play Gigi on stage on Broadway. Gigi is Colette’s most famous novel. Audrey had never spoken on stage, only in front of the camera. So, she took extra lessons for that. The production was a hit, went on tour throughout the US with stops in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Chicago and finally Los Angeles and San Francisco. Audrey was conquering the US already.