Audrey Hepburn might not have had essentially the most professionallific Hollywooden profession, however a good few of her characters nonetheless really feel in the present day like roles she was born to play. Perhaps the identical might have been true of the a part of Anne Frank, had she not refused to take it up. When Anne’s father Otto Frank inquired about it, one would possibly imagine that Hepburn felt like she didn’t have the appropriate experience to play that younger girl, now lengthy regarded because the embodiment of the victims of the Holocaust. Actually, for the actress who could be remembered as Princess Ann and Holly Golightly, it was too near residence: Hepburn might remember all too nicely her personal harrowing wartime experience within the Netherlands, coming to the purpose of starvation whereas hiding from the Nazis.
Born in Belgium, the younger Hepburn went to boarding college in England within the mid-nineteen-thirties. On the finish of that decade, with the outbreak of the warfare, she went together with her mother to dwell within the Netherlands. A student of ballet, she danced for audiences that included Nazi party members — an unavoidin a position truth of which a lot has been made — however she additionally danced, secretly, for the resistance. As biographer Robert Matzen writes, “Audrey’s celebrity as a ballerina for close toly 4 years on the Arnhem metropolis theater made her talents valuin a position to Dr. Visser ’t Hooft,” one in every of that transfermalest’s leaders, who placed on “illegal musical performances at various by-invitation-only locations” meant to earn artists money “after they’d been pressured out of the Dutch primarystream by the Nazi union of artists, the Kultuurkamer.”
Hepburn herself discusses this period in the interview clip on the high of the put up. As time went on, Matzen writes, “Dr. Visser ’t Hooft despatched her at one level during this period to take a message, and perhaps meals, to one of many downed fliers. Her qualifications have been simple: She spoke English fluently the placeas other younger people within straightforward attain within the village didn’t.”
Within the autumn of 1944, “she and her family saved a British paratrooper of their basement, the latest act in a collection of defiances,” writes Den of Geek’s David Crow. “By the following winter, they too could be living down there, cautious to even crawl out of ‘mattress’ because the bombs fell on their small Dutch village of Velp.” Eventually, “after what was left of their meals was depleted, they ate tulip bulbs. When these have been gone, they ate the weeds.”
Endured at such a younger age, this ordeal had finaling results. “The deprivations would hang-out Audrey the remainder of her days, informing her svelte body and, Matzen argues, possibly her early dying from appendiceal cancer.” No gainedder, then, that she remained truthfully taciflip about her warfare even after becoming an internationally well-known actress (an alternative to her first dream of dancing). Therefore the formidable challenge laid earlier than Matzen within the analysis that went into what turned Dutch Lady: Audrey Hepburn and World Conflict II, which you’ll be able to hear him discuss in the Storytellers’ Studio video simply above. Her story turned out differently from Anne Frank’s — which itself, as Matzen argues, beset her with a form of “survivor’s guilt” — however now, each of them dwell on as icons of the twentieth century at its gentleest and darkishest.
Related content:
Audrey Hepburn’s Moving Display screen Check for Roman Holiday (1953)
Color Footage of the Liberation of Paris, Shot by Hollywooden Director George Stevens (1944)
Charade, the Finest Hitchcock Movie Hitchcock Never Made. Stars Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn
Based mostly in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His tasks embrace the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the e-book The Statemuch less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facee-book.
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