The Tamesis
exist Dear Audrey— a new biography of Audrey Hepburn, out now from Grand Central Publishing — contains some images that feel instantly familiar. Audrey and French writer Colette, her novella Jiji Hepburn was given her first Broadway role; Audrey in the garden of her home in Switzerland, La Paisible; Audrey greets director William Wyler as Gary Cooper looks on during filming love in the afternoon. These images etched her into our collective memory as a poised, radiant, fully formed star.
But there are souvenirs of childhood left in this book that will make even the most devoted Hepburn admirer pause mid-page. Photo taken in Brussels shortly after Hepburn was born. Snapshot of a little girl standing alone, engrossed in a book. Most unexpectedly, a series of exquisite pictures appeared: carefully drawn dresses, imagined Christmas scenes in pastel colors, children gathered in quiet anticipation. They were not the work of a future icon but of a child whose life, as her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer noted, was shaped as much by absence and austerity as by her own imagination.
Dear AudreyCo-written with Wendy Holden, a former war correspondent (no relation to William Holden), it is Ferrell’s second book about motherhood, following his 1999 book. Audrey Hepburn: Elegant Soul. But where the first work was, as he describes it, “an emotional…a spiritual biography,” this new book aims to be even more explicit.
“Every year people ask, ‘When are you going to have the ultimate, authorized, true biography of Audrey Hepburn?'” he told me. “Ultimately, I thought, if I’m going to do this — because, you know, like the Hippocratic Oath, you wouldn’t do anything to your own family — I need someone to be the filter, to be the liver of the book.”
Beginning with World War II and ending with Hepburn’s tenure as UNICEF ambassador, the structure quickly came into focus. “We sat down and started creating the spine—the skeleton of the book,” he said. “You soon realize that everyone knows these movies and there’s not much to say. She’s a professional, she’s nice to the crew, she shows up on time, she doesn’t put on a show.” Instead, he’s interested in the quieter, more difficult truth. “It’s the little things that tell you who this person is,” he noted. “Because she was becoming — or had become — such a legend, she floated away like a balloon at a birthday party, and I wanted to bring her back and ground her again.”
Those “little things” aren’t always gentle. Hepburn’s father left when she was six – walking out of her life without warning – which she later described as the most traumatic event of her childhood. She cried for days, and the feeling of loss stayed with her into adulthood. Ferrell returns again and again to this kind of detail—the intimate, the precarious, the deeply human—not to undercut the myth but to contextualize it.
The drawings in the book, many of which survived the war and were tucked into family albums, give us a glimpse into her inner world. One, dated 1944, shows children watching a puppet show – an image of innocence produced during the war. Another work depicts a Christmas tree being lit and decorated, at a time when such an abundance of trees was out of reach. “They really had nothing during the war,” Sean said. “So it’s like a child’s hope — expectation, dream — of what the world will be like when things get back to normal.”
This tension between austerity and imagination, hunger and beauty, also defined Hepburn’s adult life. “What I want to say to people is that she’s a true story and she’s a real person,” Ferrell said. “She had to fight – and yet she became this extraordinary symbol and remains a lovely, decent, humble person.”
