From blink-and-you-miss-her to can’t-take-your-eyes-off-her

The quickest of cameos indeed but people around Britain’s Ealing Studios began to take more notice, though Hepburn herself after later finding success would be the first to admit that her acting skills were extremely limited. As she recalled: “By all the laws of logic I am one movie star who should never have made it. At each stage of my career I lacked the requisite experience but at least I never pretended I could do it when I couldn’t.”

As Sheridan Morley noted in this 1993 biography, now reissued, she did instinctively distance herself from the herd of hopefuls, never being an English answer to, say, Hollywood’s Joan Crawford or Lana Turner. She was a natural, moving and photographing easily, with little makeup or false eyelashes. “With Audrey, from the outset, what you saw was what you got.”

She was born Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston in Brussels on May 4, 1929 and spent her early years principally in the Belgian capital. Her parents’ marriage broke up when she was six, resulting in her commuting back and forth across the North Sea. Her mother was in Arnhem, The Netherlands, and her father in London, where she enrolled in a ballet school.

When the Second World War broke out in September 1939 she was in Arnhem. “For five long and appalling years, from the time she was 11 until she was 16,” Morley recalled, “Audrey lived under the Nazi occupation of Arnhem in conditions of terror, poverty and deprivation best captured in the diaries of the Dutch schoolgirl, her contemporary Anne Frank.

“Unlike her, Audrey was lucky enough to survive: but as her mother became more actively involved in the Resistance, and as Audrey herself took to running messages for them after school, the manner of her survival was often chancy in the extreme.”

Post-war, Audrey, still known as Edda, could claim British citzenship through her father and she won a scholarship to the Rambert School of Ballet in London. There in 1947 a Dutch film director and his producer selected her for the minor role of an air hostess in  a second-feature comedy, “Nederlands in zeven lessen” (“Dutch in Seven Lessons”). She had nil theatrical training but the two men saw an elusive strength that film-makers the world over would eventually begin to acknowledge.

So at age 18 and billed as Edda van Heemstra she made her actual film debut, though almost unseen outside Holland. There is a rough print on the internet, in Dutch and without English subtitles. She found work as a chorus girl on the London stage, her pleasantly infectious grin and bouncing enthusiasm impressing onlookers and leading to those first three 1951 films.

Her 30 seconds in the almost completely forgotten “One Wild Oat” (it is omitted from this book’s filmography) received a credit right at the end, as did “The Lavender Hill Mob”, while “Laughter in Paradise” earned her an “Introducing Audrey Hepburn” in the opening credits. She finally was able to display some real acting talent in “The Secret People” (1952), then caught the eye of the French writer Colette, who had published the novella “Gigi” in 1944, and personally chose the inexperienced Hepburn for the eponymous role in a theatre production on Broadway in New York in 1951. The reviews were excellent.

But it was the film “Roman Holiday”, a romantic comedy directed by William Wyler in 1953 and co-starring Gregory Peck and Hepburn, that really brought her widespread fame. It earned rave notices and she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. As Morley opines, the model and dancer turned actress “remained alone and apart, without the glacial chill that was always to limit Grace Kelly; she combined the elfin-child quality of Peter Pan with, now, a distinct sexiness and a warmth that was lacking in many of her European contemporaries”.

She was cast in the play “Ondine”, opening on Broadway in February 1954, and earned more ecstatic notices. But despite this triumph and the huge hits “Gigi,” “Roman Holiday” and the film “Sabrina Fair” with Humphrey Bogart and William Holden in 1954, all in less than three years, she still had doubts as to being a “legitimate” stage actress. So she stuck to film.

Morley takes readers through Hepburn’s marriage to American actor and director Mel Ferrer, their retreat to Switzerland and a pregnancy that failed to go full term due to her ever-fragile health. But she was an all-singing, all-dancing partner for Fred Astaire in the musical “Funny Face” (1957), where “the whole, elfin, enchanting Hepburn image first came fully into focus”.

Shot against all the classic landmarks of Paris, the film became “a cinematic metaphor for the way that Audrey herself was somehow simultaneously now being released and transfixed by the movie camera, itself able to convey, long before the term became fashionable, an image perhaps more potent than the reality of what she was as an actress”.

There were less convincing roles and failures too – “Love in the Afternoon” (1957) damaged her image thanks to a tawdry screen affair with one too many older leading men, and neither did “Green Mansions” (1959) and “The Unforgiven” (1960) do her any good. But Morley opined that “By the time Audrey starred in ’My Fair Lady’… she had given us ’Roman Holiday’ and ’Sabrina Fair’ and ’Funny Face’ and ’Charade’ and ’Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, films that will live as long as anyone ever wants to know what Hollywood once meant by stylish comedy.

“If her dramatic work was somewhat less impressive, there is still ’War and Peace’ and ’The Nun’s Story’ and an underrated Lillian Hellman tale of schoolmistresses unjustly accused of lesbianism, ’The Children’s Hour’.” Thus, high-society comedy, a Fred Astaire musical, serious drama, international epics, she’d done them all in less than seven years from a standing start.

But while she was still fashion’s darling for photographers and magazine editors on both sides of the Atlantic, Hollywood was moving away from elegance to a grainy realism. Semi-retired, she would make only four more films In her final 25 years. Her marriage to Ferrer over, she retreated to her home in Switzerland with their son Sean. A second marriage to  Italian psychiatrist  Andrea Dotti produced another son but also ended in divorce, then she found the right man, Dutch compatriot Rob Wolders, for the last decade of her life.

In March 1988 at a gala in Tokyo in aid of the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund, Hepburn became a Special Ambassador, visiting countries such as Ethiopia, Somalia, Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam where starvation and drought needed world attention.

After three and a half years of this her health began to fail and a tumour was removed from her colon, but she died at home in Switzerland in January 1993 aged 63. In her words: “I decided, very early on, just to accept life unconditionally; I never expected it to do anything special for me, yet I seem to have accomplished far more than I had ever hoped. Most of the time it just happened to me without my ever seeking it.”

Morley: “Audrey Hepburn 1929-1993: a tender and steadfast heart. We shall not see her like again, except, thank God, on the films she left us to remember her by, and in the memories of those who were visited, or appealed to, by the greatest of goodwill ambassadors.”

Yes, beauty, style, charisma, innocence, humanity – these are things of benefit to bestow on a fractured world.