Hollywood’s fairest lady broke our hearts

A generation were secretly in love with Audrey Hepburn, writes William Hall, yet she couldn’t find the love she longed for

Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto
Hutchinson, £18.99 order this book

CONFESSION time. We had this secret love affair, Audrey Hepburn and I, for years. It was secret in the sense that I knew it and she never found out.
That was back in 1953. It was Audrey’s big screen chance after being discovered on Broadway in Gigi, it made her an international star and she deservedly won an Oscar for her performance.
Her director, William Wyler, who knew a thing or two about star quality, would say later: “Audrey was just born with it. You cannot learn it. God kissed her on the cheek and there she was.” Magic words for a magic lady.
I met her on location near Pamplona where she was making Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery as an ageing Robin Hood and Audrey as an ageless Maid Marian. The movie was heralded as Hepburn’s “comeback” film after eight long years away from the screen, and with those huge haunting hazel eyes and pale elfin features she looked every bit the icon she had become.
In that time she had shunned the limelight, living quietly in her Rome apartment with her second husband, Italian psychiatrist Dr Andrea Dotti, their five-year-old son Luca and her son Sean, 15, from her first marriage to actor Mel Ferrer.
Now at 46, she was actually putting on the performance of her life – not for the screen, but for those who found her marriage to handsome Dr Dotti, nine years her junior, a constant source of intrigue and gossip.
It all came back to me this week with the publication of a new book Enchantment – the Life of Audrey Hepburn by Donald Spoto. Audrey had me fooled, just as she had the world fooled as she bravely tried to disguise the fact that her marriage to the womanising Dotti was falling apart. “People are always sniping,” she said to me. “It’s very boring, wounding and hurtful. The fact is that our marriage is extremely happy.”
The fact was that it wasn’t, and two years later it was over, as Spoto details in his meticulously researched biography. Dotti himself – what a name for a shrink! – is quoted as saying: “Italian husbands have never been famous for being faithful.” Ouch.
It was Audrey’s second attempt at finding lasting love, and Spoto leaves no emotional stone unturned as he traces her desperate need for security back to her roots in wartime Holland.
Born in Brussels in 1929, she was the daughter of an English father and a Dutch aristocrat mother, Ella Baroness van Heemstra, whose Victorian attitude chilled the little girl: “She had a conviction that anything more effusive than a perfunctory goodnight kiss was indecorous,” writes Spoto.
When Audrey was six, her father inexplicably packed his bags and walked out of the family home in Holland, never to return. Audrey was devastated. “I worshipped my father. He left us insecure – perhaps for life.” And in a moment of rare honesty she added: “It stayed with me throughout my own relationships. When I fell in love and got married, I lived in constant fear of being left.”
Back in England after the war, Audrey studied ballet with Marie Rambert, and featured in West End musicals and minor film parts.
Then her career took off. A year after Roman Holiday she was starring on Broadway in Ondine – and captivated her co-star Mel Ferrer so completely that he married her. The pair also starred together in King Vidor’s mighty War and Peace – she as Natasha, he as Andrei.
Ferrer later produced Wait Until Dark (1967) – with a fifth Oscar nomination for his wife, the others being for Sabrina (1954), The Nun’s Story (1959) and as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), the role that somehow remains forever embedded in the public psyche as Audrey’s very own.
But for that other great hit My Fair Lady, Spoto is scathing in his denunciation of studio mogul Jack Warner for dubbing singer Marni Nixon’s voice in the musical numbers – “an astonishing act of deliberate deception” – while Hepburn was still struggling with her voice training up to the last minute.
Yet even at this high point in her career, Audrey Hepburn was racked with doubts. After a series of miscarriages she had given birth to her first son, Sean, and was overjoyed. “I began to resent the time I spent away on location,” she said. “Motherhood was always the real me. The movies were fairy tales.”
In 1967 she made her choice. Family first, fairy tales second. For the next eight years Audrey Hepburn would become a full-time mother to young Sean. Ironically it was that year which saw the end of her marriage to Ferrer, whose own career ambitions had taken him away from the family hearth so often. She filed for divorce. Later she would tell friends: “I am completely recovered. Now I am free and at peace.” It sounded more like getting over an illness.
Not for long. Audrey met the handsome Dr Dotti aboard a yacht amid the Greek islands. A whirlwind courtship… and they were married just six weeks after her divorce came through. Too soon, said her friends – and they would be proved right.
Three years later Audrey gave birth to her second son, Luca, and for a time it seemed she had found happiness at last. But her husband was spotted too many times living the sweet life with a variety of attractive women companions in the hothouse of Rome’s notorious dolce vita. Their divorce would go through in 1982.
Audrey’s last beau was a young Dutch actor named Robert Wolders, whose charm and consideration gave her a certain happiness in their remaining 14 years together.
She also found new meaning to her life: approached by UNICEF, she became a special ambassador touring Africa, Mexico and South America to help starving children.

But the arduoud scedule had a cost. Never in robust health,Audrey fell ill with stomach pains, and finally learned that she had widespread colonic cancer, from which she never recovered.

On Janaury 20 1993,aged 63, she died peacefully in bed at her Swiss home La Paisible - it means "the peaceful place" - above Lake Geneva.

Our fairest lady was gone. Six close friends and family were round her bedside. But across the world a million more male romantics mourned the news. Actually, though i neer told her, make that a million and one.