As a young boy, Sean Hepburn Ferrer never felt like the son of a movie icon – but there’s no denying he was.
His mum was none other than Audrey Hepburn, the star who lit up the silver screen in classics including Roman Holiday and Breakfast at Tiffany’s – and whose legend lives on to this day.
But to Sean, Audrey was just “Mum”, and with his latest biography, Intimate Audrey, he hopes to give the world a glimpse into the very human side of the legend.
“She chose not to live in Hollywood because she knew how important it was to stay in touch with everyday life,” says Sean, now a 65-year-old father of three.
“I’m trying to bring her down to earth. I can never shatter the creative work, the elegance… but she was a normal, real person. That’s really why I did this.”
To know the real Audrey, says Sean, is to understand that her early years were blighted by hardship and heartbreak.
Belgium-born Audrey was just six in 1935 when her father walked out on her family.
Her mother, Dutch baroness Ella van Heemstra, was a thwarted opera singer who, along with her ex-husband, was an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler before World War II, even joining the British Union of Fascists and writing articles about his “magnetic and most charming personality”.
A childhood marked by war
Audrey was sent to boarding school in England in the late ’30s, but when war broke out, her mother mistakenly believed she’d be safer in the Netherlands and brought her home.
For the next six years, Audrey and her family endured bombing raids and malnutrition, subsisting on stale turnips and bread baked from ground-up tulip bulbs. At times, she was so weak and her legs so swollen, she could only lie in bed.
She also witnessed brutal acts of violence and saw Jews rounded up and taken away to concentration camps.
Audrey once recalled, “I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on the train. I was a child observing a child.”
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As a teenager, she carried messages in her shoes to members of the Resistance without being caught, but she didn’t escape unscathed.
At one point, a piece of shrapnel became embedded in her neck during an air raid. It permanently restricted her movement and for many years after she became famous, the public assumed her famously upright posture was the result of ballet training.
Audrey’s incredible rise from the ashes
After the war, Audrey worked as a dancer in London and began to get small roles in British films.
“She came from nobility and a certain amount of education,” says Sean.
“But she came out of the war with nothing and she picked herself up.”
She was offered the chance to play Holocaust victim Anne Frank in a movie but turned it down because the subject matter was just too close.
Her storybook moment came in 1953 when she was cast in Roman Holiday, for which she won an Oscar. From that moment, Audrey was a superstar, appearing in movies, including Sabrina in 1954, Funny Face in 1957 and Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1961.
By then, she’d married writer-producer Mel Ferrer, who was not pleased when she fell pregnant with Sean. Audrey had to promise she would meet their child’s financial needs and once said wryly that as soon as the pregnancy was confirmed, he would ask her to move something heavy.
The ordinary life behind the icon
Her second marriage, to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, was no more successful. They welcomed son Luca in 1970, but Andrea was a serial philanderer, who once pretended he’d fought off kidnappers rather than admit a jealous husband had him beaten up. Their marriage ended in 1982.
While Audrey’s screen career continued through the sixties, she prioritised motherhood and Sean says he had a “normal childhood” in Switzerland and Rome, far from Hollywood.
He explains, “She had normal priorities. She realised that life is short, fickle and delicate – and you can’t want a family and when it comes, not put your elbow into it.”
Luca Dotti, now 56, also recalls his mother’s down-to-earth approach to life, sharing that her favourite dish was a bowl of pasta with nothing on it except a little ketchup, olive oil, butter and hard cheese, preferably eaten in front of the television.
Audrey died in 1993, aged 63, from a rare form of abdominal cancer.
Unlike any ordinary person, however, her funeral swamped the small village just outside of Geneva, Switzerland, where she lived.
“Our village of 400 or 500 inhabitants swelled up to 25,000,” recalls Sean.
“It was like a rock concert, the cars parked as far as your eyes could see…”
