Literary Lives 12

been a hit on stage, was not offered the part. Jack L Warner (Warner Bros) instead offered the part to Audrey Hepburn because he thought that Hepburn was more bankable. Hepburn also thought the part should be given to Andrews but was eventually cast in the role. Rex Harrison sensibly got the part of Professor Higgins. Despite Hepburn’s lengthy vocal preparation for the role of the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, the producers decided to dub Hepburn’s singing voice by using Marvi Nixon. It was a great disappointment to Hepburn who had sung successfully in Funny Face. Nevertheless, critics applauded Hepburn’s performance. Time magazine reported that Hepburn’s acting was “the best of her career”, while Soundstage commented that:

“Audrey Hepburn is magnificent. She is Eliza for the ages. Everyone agreed that if Julie Andrews was not to be in the film, Audrey Hepburn was the perfect choice.”

- Soundstage, 1964

Jule Andrews won the Academy Award for Mary Poppins at the 37th Academy Awards. Hepburn was not nominated. However, she did win nominations for both Golden Globe and New York Film Critics Circle awards.

As the 1960s continued, Hepburn appeared in How to Steal a Million (1966) opposite Peter O’Toole, and followed it with Two for the Road (1967) with Albert Finney, and Wait Until Dark (1967) where she played the part of a terrorised blind girl. It was a difficult film for Hepburn on the brink of a divorce from her husband Mel Ferrer who was the film’s producer. She won her fifth and final Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

“As you grow older you will discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself, the other for helping others.

- Audrey Hepburn

After 1967, Hepburn chose to spend more time with her family. Her fourteen-year marriage to the actor Mel Ferrer was coming to an end. They had a son Sean Hepburn Ferrer who was eight years old. Ferrer and Hepburn were divorced in 1968. She met her second husband, psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, on a Mediterranean cruise with friends in June 1968. She wanted to have more children and stop working. She married Dotti on January 18, 1969 and their son Luca Andrea Dotti was born on February 8, 1970. The Dotti-Hepburn marriage would last 13 years but was dissolved in 1982.

“Good things aren’t supposed to just fall into your lap. God is very generous, but he expects you to do your part first.”

- Audrey Hepburn

Hepburn made an attempt to come back to films when she was paired with Sean Connery in Robin and Marian (1976), with Connery starring as Robin Hood – a sensitive period piece.

“Connery and Hepburn seemed to have arrived at a tacit understanding between themselves about their characters. They glow. They really do seem in love. And they project as marvellously complex, fond, tender people; the passage of twenty years has given them grace and wisdom.” AUDREY HEPBURN, working in her later years as a UN Ambassador. - Roger Ebert, film critic and author

She was reunited with director Terence Young in Bloodline (1979) with Ben Gazzara, James Mason and Romy Schneider – a critical and boxoffice failure. One of her last starring roles was also opposite Ben Gazzara in the Peter Bogdanovich comedy They All Laughed (1981) – a film overshadowed by the murder of one if its stars Dorothy Stratten. Six years later she co-starred with Robert Wagner in a television film Love Among Thieves (1987). When she had finished her last motion picture role she only appeared once more in the critically acclaimed Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn – filmed on location in seven countries in 1990 and aired the day after her death on January 21, 1993. A spoken word album Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales was recorded in 1992 and earned her a posthumous Grammy Award.

In 1989, Audrey Hepburn was appointed a Goodwill Ambassador of UNICEF following trips to Mek’ele in Ethiopia and Turkey in 1988.

“I feel desperate. I can’t stand the idea that two million people are in imminent danger of starving to death, many of them children ... food sitting in the northern port of Shoa. It can’t be distributed ... I went into rebel country and saw mothers and their children who had walked for ten days, even three weeks, looking for food, settling onto the desert floor into makeshift camps where they may die.” - Audrey Hepburn, 1988

She told the US Congress of her experiences in Venezuela and Ecuador, and saw these mountain communities, slums; shantytowns receive water for the first time – because of the miracle of UNICEF. She toured Central America in February 1989, and met with leaders in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. She visited Sudan and reported that, because of civil war, food from agencies had been cut off. In October 1989 she went to Bangladesh. A UN photographer reported that Hepburn would hug diseased children covered in flies. They reached out to touch her. She was a Pied Piper.

In October 1990, Hepburn travelled to Vietnam for UNICEF to collaborate with the government for national UNICEF-supported immunisation

“I walked into a nightmare. I have seen famine in Ethiopia and Bangladesh, but nothing like this – so much worse than I could have imagined.” - Audrey Hepburn

She was a tireless ambassador for UNICEF. In 1992, President George HW Bush presented Hepburn with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work with UNICEF, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences posthumously awarded her the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her contribution to humanity.

From 1984 until her death in 1993, Hepburn was in a relationship with the Dutch actor Robert Wolders, the widower of actress Merle Oberon. She called the nine years she spent with him the happiest of her life.

When she returned to Somalia in 1992, Hepburn began suffering from abdominal pain. A laparoscopy performed at the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in Los Angeles in November revealed a rare form of abdominal cancer known as pseudomyxoma peritonei. The cancer, over several years, had metastasised over her small intestine. After surgery, she began chemotherapy. Hepburn and her family returned home to Switzerland for her last Christmas. Fashion designer and longtime friend Hubert de Givenchy arranged for the Mellon private Gulfstream jet to take Hepburn from Los Angeles to Geneva. She spent her last days at her home in Tolochenaz, Vaud.

On the evening of January 20, 1993, Hepburn died in her sleep. Her funeral was held in the Tolochenaz village church on February 24, 1993. Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan of UNICEF delivered the eulogy at the funeral which was attended by her partner Robert Wolders, half brother Ian Quarles van Ufford, ex-husbands Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, Hubert de Givenchy, executives of UNICEF, and actors Alain Delon and Roger Moore. Flower arrangements were sent by Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor and the Dutch Royal family. She was interred at the Tolochenaz Cemetery the same day.

In 2002, at a United Nations Special Session UNICEF honoured Audrey Hepburn’s legacy of humanitarian work by unveiling a statue, The Spirit of Audrey”, at UNICEF’s New York headquarters. Sean Ferrer, her son, founded the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund in memory of his mother shortly after her death. The US Fund for UNICEF also founded the Audrey Hepburn Society, chaired by Luca Andrea Dotti, her other son, which celebrates UNICEF’s biggest donors, and which has raised over $100 million so far. Dotti also became Patron of the Pseudomyxoma Survivor Charity dedicated to providing support to patients of the rare cancer from which Hepburn suffered.

• Sir Christopher Ondaatje is the author of The Last Colonial. He acknowledges that he had quoted liberally from Wikipedia; Audrey Hepburn (1994) by Warren G. Harris; Audrey Hepburn, an Elegant Spirit (2005) by Sean Ferrer; Audrey Hepburn: A Biography (2009) by Martin Gitlin; and Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II (2019) by Robert Matzen.