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Breakfast with Audrey

If alive, Audrey Hepburn would have celebrated her 90th birthday with her friends recently.

Breakfast with Audrey

Audrey Hepburn worked in some memorable films like My Fair Lady.



Gautam Kaul

If alive, Audrey Hepburn would have celebrated her 90th birthday with her friends recently. Indian audiences of English language cinemas first came to be introduced to Audrey Hepburn through the film Roman Holiday, made in 1952 in which Audrey acted against Gregory Peck who played an American newspaper reporter on a visit to Rome to cover a diplomatic event. Hepburn in this film was an Italian princess who escapes the confines of her conservative castle, and stepped out into the streets of Rome and into a world of carefree freedom and anonymity, only to come in the way of the scooter-riding press reporter, and get befriended. Before the princess is traced back to continue her imperial duties, she has learnt a lot of the American way of life, a thing called freedom and democracy, and of all matters, about love.

Audrey Hepburn offered her cinema audience a different look at Hollywood away from the bosomy Jane Russell, Jane Mansfield and their ilk. She was thin framed, a fact she contributed to her days of starvation living in Holland under a Nazi occupation regime when she suffered privations for days along with her family. Her petit baby face even when she was in her late thirties, charmed young women and influenced them to adopt that ‘Hepburn look’ of a hairstyle with a shock of trimmed hair covering the forehead, a thin waist line and court shoes.

Hepburn started her career rather indifferently after the War in Europe came to a close. Her mother was from an aristocratic family and her father was from the British diplomatic service. Born in 1931 in Belgium, the family got trapped in the sudden invasion by the Nazis in Holland, and took shelter moving from farm house to farm houses, losing her sisters to capture and being sent to the concentration camp where they died in gas chambers.

Audrey then moved to England, where she continued to be trained as a ballerina. She was noticed by fashion model agents who found her thin frame suited the fashion. She found modelling as a vocation, and featured in some fashion magazines. Her dancing lessons helped her get a role in a Broadway musical called Gigi. It was here that film director William Wyler discovered her and decided she was the one actress to be cast in his next film, Roman Holiday.

The release of Roman Holiday (1952) and its fantastic run in cinema halls worldwide, was enough to get Audrey Hepburn votes for the Best Actress of the Year at the Oscars, at BAFTA, and the Golden Globe. Then began a swift film career which saw Audrey sail through a series of great and memorable films, such as Sabrina (1954), War and Peace (1956), The Nun’s Story (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), Wait Until Dark (1967) just to mention a few.

As Audrey Hepburn moved from one big film to another, picking nominations for the Oscars, or BAFTA or Golden Globe, she kept the Hollywood paparazzi at bay and rejected the managing agent’s directions to fall in love with the hero of her films. Eventually she came out with a star image of a fun loving Roman Catholic with a no nonsense clean image. Her association with The Nun’s Story (1959), a biopic which was filmed in the deep forests of Congo, also helped realise the enormous difference of reality in New York and the jungles of Congo which  changed her personality.

Once the flood of offers and script came to thin out, Audrey married Mel Ferrar whom she had met during the shooting of Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1956). She bore him two sons, and then divorced to marry two more times. 

Between 1960 and 1985, Audrey Hepburn took a new role for herself to become a Unicef Ambassador, promoting full time the humanitarian work of Unicef. As the world came to know the tragedy of the birth of Bangladesh, Audrey Hepburn travelled into Bangladesh via Delhi and Calcutta and camped in that country to observe the international relief work underway to resettle the refugees. She visited South American nations which were hit by maladministration, cyclones and earthquakes. She visited South Sudan during a famine and discovered it was all manmade. Finally she decided to move away from all the worldly contacts of fashion and high living and retired to a stately home in Switzerland. The US President, bestowed upon Hepburn the ‘Medal of Freedom’ for her humanitarian work extended over a long tenure.

Hepburn now detected she was afflicted with a rare form of colon cancer but she moved around on her own assigned social work until a weak body could not bear the strain. She entered hospital for treatment, and a surgical operation, never to return to her home to rest.

Her funeral was largely attended by many of her old associates, European nobility, and family members.

A tearful Gregory Peck read Audrey’s favourite  poem “Unending Love”, written by Rabindranath Tagore, at her funeral, using it as his tribute to the ‘star’ which Hollywood had  said , was one of the 15 most shining ones in American film history. The Agha Khan represented the Unicef here. She died on January 20, 1993, aged 63 years.

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