Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn is my all-time favorite actress of all time.  She was born in May 1929 in Brussels (that's in Belgium) to Baroness Edda van Heemstra.  Her given name is Audrey Hepburn-Ruston (they were going to name her Andrew if she were a boy).  Audrey's childhood was a tragic one; her father abandoned her family when she was only a child, and she spent the following years hiding, starving, and delivering anti-Nazi literature in Amsterdam during World War II.  Her only dream was to be a ballerina, but she was often too weak from hunger to practice.  She held amateur classes for other starving children when she was eleven.  After the war, her life continued as before, only now with a few diseases acquired from such malnutrition.  She went to a ballet academy, where she was heart-broken as they said she was too tall and too underdeveloped to ever get anywhere with ballet.  Her mother helped her along, and Audrey soon had a decent modeling career and was doing bit-parts in British movies on the side.  Her big break came when she was goofing around in a hotel lobby.  The playwright of Gigi was there looking for an unknown to star in her Broadway play.  She saw Audrey and said she was perfect.  Audrey won a Tony award for her first theatre role.  That same year, she won an Oscar (after this, she said, "Now that I've

won an Oscar I think I'd better learn how to act) for her role as Princess Ann in her first American film, co-starring Gregory Peck, Roman Holiday.  The rest is history!  Audrey went on to star in thirty more films during her lifetime.  Her most famous movies include Breakfast at Tiffany's and My Fair Lady.  Other than her movies, she is most well-known for her affect on women's fashion.  No one had looked like her before, and no one has since.  Her original gamine, sophiticatedly elegant, graceful, yet simple style still affects fashion today.  She retired from film-making to spend more times with her sons, Sean and Luca, and spent the last five years of her life as a special ambassador for UNICEF, the same organization that had saved her life after the war all those years before.  She died of cancer in 1993.  Audrey Hepburn was rated the third best actress of all time.  And that's only the half of it! To find out more, check out these books: Audrey Style - Pamela Clarke Keogh Audrey Hepburn - Barry Paris Audrey Hepburn: A Life in Pictures - Carol Krenz Adieu Audrey - Klaus-Jurgen Sembach

Here are some of my favorite pics...

Audrey Hepburn's Filmography