The Return Of Audrey Hepburn

Say the name Audrey Hepburn, and even now — 45 years after the movie came out — it's impossible not to think of "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Lately, Hepburn, or somebody trying to look like her, seems to be everywhere. She even made a Halloween appearance on the CBS sitcom "The Class."

And twenty-somethings, whose grandparents went to see Hepburn in "Funny Face" when it came out in 1957, saw Hepburn this fall, jumping out of the film into a Gap ad.

"I think she's totally timeless, and at the same time very timely, with what's going on right now in fashion," Trey Laird, creative director of the Gap who thought of the Hepburn ad, told Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner. "Her voice, her movement, her eyes, her smile, her style ... everything about her is so unique."

She never considered herself even pretty, nor a good actress, she told The Early Show co-anchor Harry Smith in 1991.

"I find it very hard to look at myself, and I think I fall short of what my performance should have been, but as time goes by, I'm becoming much nicer to myself," she said then.

Hepburn was flat-chested, tall and long-necked in an era when leading ladies tended to look like Marilyn Monroe. She was an unlikely star.

"Isn't that the way every Cinderella story begins?" her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer said. "I mean, she sees herself as the ugly duckling. She's different from everybody else. She's not sexy. She's not voluptuous. She didn't have the proper training [and] lost everything."

Audrey Ruston was born in 1929, the daughter of Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch baroness, and Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, a good-looking British ne'er-do-well, who sympathized with the Nazis and walked out on his family when Hepburn was six.

"What kind of yearning does that create? What kind of desire, need, hole that can never be filled?" Ferrer said. "Everything has an impact."

Arnhem, the Dutch town where Hepburn and her mother lived, was the site of one of the biggest and bloodiest battles in World War II. In the aftermath, they nearly starved to death.

"Pretty soon they were eating (tulip) bulbs and bread was made with peas, so it was green, and they were eating dog cookies," Ferrer said.

When food finally arrived, it came from the United Nations agency that was the forerunner to UNICEF, a favor Hepburn would return one day as spokeswoman.

Hepburn wanted more than anything to be a ballerina, but she was too tall, too old, and too malnourished to make up for the years she had lost to the war. She did manage to dance, but as a chorus girl in London cabaret shows.

The French author, Colette, made Hepburn a star when she spotted her on a Monte Carlo beach and decided Hepburn would be perfect for the Broadway version of her novella, "Gigi."

But it was as a princess running away from responsibility into the arms of Gregory Peck that she became a Hollywood star. In 1954, at the age of 24, she won an Academy Award for "Roman Holiday."

Enter Hubert de Givenchy. In an interview in Paris earlier this month, the fashion designer — now nearly 80 — remembered when "Miss Hepburn" appeared for her appointment, to ask him to dress her in her second Hollywood film, "Sabrina."

"And I'm thinking it's Katharine Hepburn. At that time, I never heard about Audrey Hepburn," he recalled.

Little did he know his name and her look would end up forever linked. She would wear his clothes in eight films, among them, "Funny Face," "Charade," and of course, "Breakfast at Tiffany's." Hepburn's friendship with Givenchy outlasted her two failed marriages.

Her first husband was actor/director Mel Ferrer. Her second was psychiatrist and Italian aristocrat Andrea Dotti. She desperately wanted children and, after multiple miscarriages, had two sons, Sean and Luca.

When her boys were small, Hepburn made home movies, but stopped making Hollywood movies for eight years to be with them. Sean Hepburn Ferrer said his mother's need to love and be loved was almost central to her identity.

"It's interesting that someone whose faith has been so shaken would be such an advocate for it and hang onto it with such passion," he said.

Hepburn and UNICEF were the perfect match — a passionate coming together of her need to love and be loved and the millions of desperate children she was determined to help.

A 1988 trip to Ethiopia was the first of eight she took for UNICEF. By the time she left on her last mission, to Somalia, cancer was killing her. She died on January 20, 1993. Her sons set up the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund.

Yet 13 years after her death, she still captivates people. On the day that Christie's auction house announced it would be auctioning for charity (on December 5) one of the famous "little black dresses" Givenchy designed for her to wear in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," even a model dressed up to look like Hepburn drew a crowd. The dress is estimated to sell for at least $120,000.

"She had such elegance and grace and finesse and intelligence that she certainly endured," Helen Bailey, who works at Christies, said. "Maybe it's something that nowadays people are harking back to, and being inspired by her all over again."

"The Audrey Hepburn Treasures," is a book that details some of the most precious items of the Hepburn estate. All profits will go to the Audrey Hepburn Children's Fund.