The Sunday Times
1 February 2009

A retrospective shows Audrey Hepburn had more range than is often credited to her

“Big feet. Too skinny. A bump on the nose. Not interesting, and not a great actress.” It’s a description few would associate with one of the silver screen’s most iconic beauties - but it’s the way Audrey Hepburn saw herself, according to her son.

Sean Ferrer is chatting between puffs of a cigarette at his home in Florence. “That’s obviously not how anyone else saw her,” he points out. “That’s how she saw herself. To everyone else she was this beautiful package, absolutely inimitable. But she only saw the imperfections. Then again, if she had believed in her own beauty, she would never have come off the way she did.”

There, in a dainty, size-zero nutshell, is Hepburn’s charm factor. A gamine starlet, regularly voted “most beautiful” or “most stylish woman”, she never seemed to really get what all the fuss was about. She may have reached demi-goddess status because of what she did on film and for fashion, but underneath the tiara, the pearls and the Givenchy dresses, was a survivor of the second world war who didn’t believe in taking herself too seriously.

“If Holly Golightly needed to be glamorous, then she was glamorous,” explains her son, in his sleepy, Italo-American drawl that has none of his mother’s clipped, quirky precision.

Last week, Hepburn, who died in 1993, was the subject of a special tribute at the Retroback classic film festival in Granada, Spain, and later this month the Glasgow Film Festival will do the same with a retrospective of her films.

Ferrer remembers his mother as having a lighthearted approach to her work. “She realised that if she was going to do something, she needed to do it properly, and be that character. She did a wonderful job, but she also had a sense of humour. She knew it was a fake glamour. All the jewellery was fake, of course. Holly was a call girl with no money! It was all fun,” he says.

Although Hepburn is remembered as the chic waif in the oversized black sunglasses and LBD, Ferrer never saw her as a movie star while growing up.

“I had no idea. We didn’t have VHS or DVDs at that time, and didn’t have a screening room - we’re not that kind of family.” He remembers tickling her bare feet while she put on her make-up and her taking him into town in Switzerland to buy books or socks. “She was a normal, unpretentious person who loved cooking and gardening. She was very strong in some regards, and very gentle.”

“Audrey wasn’t just a ‘fluff’ actress. She had great depth, and always wanted to stretch herself as an actress.”

Hepburn married the American actor Mel Ferrer in 1954, and suffered two miscarriages before having Sean in 1960. The two were very close, and he still thinks of his mother as his best friend. Her death marked a crossroads in his professional life, and he put his film development career on hold to set up a children’s fund in his mother’s name.

“It wasn’t really until she passed away that I realised to what point she had touched her public; through her films and her style, but also through her work for Unicef.” He joined with his half-brother Luca Dotti, from his mother’s marriage to the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, and Robert Wolders, her companion for the last 12 years of her life, who accompanied Hepburn on Unicef trips.

“Of all the work she did, her humanitarian work makes me most proud,” says Ferrer. “She spent the last five years of her life doing work with children for Unicef, and in some spiritual way, it was a closing of the circle for her. It let people see that the twig they had fallen in love with 40 years earlier had grown into this beautiful, strong oak tree.”

Ferrer is chairman of The Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund which runs children’s charity projects in America and Africa. He spends a large part of his time managing her estate, overseeing the use of her image, and has written a biography: Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit: A Son Remembers. Despite the public’s enduring fascination, he is in no rush to write another.

“The book started out a 30-page letter for my kids who never got to meet this mythical grandmother. I wanted to give them a sense of what she was like.”

After a literary agent convinced him to turn it into a book, Ferrer says he is “done” with writing about his mother.

“I feel kind of sheepish about using that trampoline that’s really not my own,” he explains. “If I wrote something, it would probably be fiction. I would create a whole new character based on her style. Maybe a children’s book, or a cartoon. Like The Adventures of Little Audrey, with the big eyes.”

There is a sense that Ferrer does not quite know how to separate himself from his mother; every project he begins brings him back to the woman he adores. He says he has never heard a bad word spoken about her, and was clearly devastated by her death, aged 63. Although he is keen to protect her legacy, he is also sensitive about which projects get the green light. Film proposals about his mother’s life make him very cautious, for example.

“They always come to you at the last minute when the script is already written. It’s already baked. So it’s like, ‘What do you need me for? You just want me to splatter my name all over the poster?’ ” Other offers are thrown out if Ferrer feels they are too full of “perfume and shoulder pads and ice cubes”.

Although Ferrer has written about his mother’s famous dress sense, he is also keen for his mother’s acting to be given due recognition, pointing out that she was “more than just a cute face, but also a serious actress”. The organisers of the Glasgow Film Festival believe their retrospective will showcase the actress’s range.

“Audrey wasn’t just a ‘fluff’ actress,” says Allison Gardner, the co-director. “Although she’s probably remembered best as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she had great depth, and always wanted to stretch herself as an actress.”

Born in 1929, Hepburn lived through the Nazi occupation of Holland. Anne Frank, who was the same age as Hepburn, was in hiding a few streets away. Adopting the Dutch-sounding pseudonym Edda van Heemstra for safety, Hepburn suffered from depression and malnutrition as a result.

“As someone who knew her own feelings inside out, she brought that emotion into her acting,” says Gardner. “Anyone who thinks they know Audrey after seeing Tiffany’s should watch The Unforgiven or The Children’s Hour. Both were quite unusual roles, and very interesting to watch.”

The first is a western co-starring Burt Lancaster, where Hepburn plays a Kiowa Indian adopted by whites; the second is a dark thriller where she and Shirley MacLaine play teachers at a girls’ school accused of having a lesbian affair. Both films are seldom shown on the big screen, so it will be a rare opportunity for fans.

The programme also includes several romantic comedies, showing that the pixieish actress was equally comfortable playing the tomboy, socialite or little girl lost. “When Audrey played Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, Sabrina Fairchild in Sabrina or Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she seemed merely to be playing herself,” says Rachel Moseley, a lecturer in film and television studies at the University of Warwick, and author of Growing Up with Audrey Hepburn.

“There was a transparency about her screen persona that made her accessible, even though she had a poise and a difference that set her apart. Her most well-loved roles were Cinderella stories, echoing her origins in war-torn Europe. Her 1950s stardom was both boyish and liberated and yet at the same time absolutely feminine.”

Ferrer’s own favourite film from his mother’s back catalogue, Funny Face, will be given a special Valentine’s Day screening. “It means a lot to watch her get to dance with Fred Astaire,” says Ferrer. “She always wanted to be a dancer throughout her youth, and trained at the Arnhem Conservatory. She was a beautiful dancer but missed out because of the war.”

He is pleased to see a new generation of fans discovering his mother’s work, and is in no doubt that with or without his help, her legacy will continue.

“Since she passed away, I miss her a lot. But I’ll walk into a hotel room in Japan, and she’ll be on the screen with subtitles, or I’ll pass through some Spanish train station and see her on a magazine. That makes it easier.”

The Glasgow Film Festival runs from 12-22 February. http://www.audreyhepburn.com/

Read the original Sunday Times article here.