‘Cause people seem to only post the 20-something Audrey Hepburn.
Audrey Hepburn was the granddaughter of a baron, the daughter of a nazi sympathizer, spent her teens doing ballet to secretly raise money for the dutch resistance against the nazis, and spent her post-film career as a goodwill ambassador of UNICEF, winning the presidential medal of freedom for her efforts.
…and history remembers her as pretty.
this is the first time I have ever seen a picture of her older than 20 and I think that’s scary
I starting looking up info about her life after reading this post and my god, she was a badass.
During the war her uncle was executed by the Nazis, her half-brother was sent to a labour camp, and she suffered malnutrition bad enough to put an end to her ballet dancing professionally, and making it difficult for her to gain weight for the rest of her life. (People today still comment on her pretty thinness, but that was where it came from.)
She related deeply to the story of Anne Frank as they were the same age, and their lives did in fact entwine a little-
If you read the diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, ‘Five hostages shot today’. That was the day my uncle was shot.
-but when offered the role of Anne Frank to play, she turned it down because she felt she couldn’t exploit Frank’s life to further her career. That’s not all-!
Her father was a Nazi sympathiser but she certainly wasn’t. She risked her life delivering messages and raising money for the Dutch Resistance. (When spotted and questioned on one of these occasions, she disarmingly smiled and handed the soldiers some flowers, and they let her go on her way.) She would dance ballet in ‘black performances’ for money.
Did she rest on her laurels after all that? No! She became a volunteer nurse, to help out all the other people who’d suffered terribly during the war. This desire to help others lasted her her entire life, and so (as most peope already know) in her later years she spent six months a year travelling the world doing humanitarian work. As well as the Presidental Medal of Freedom, she was posthumously awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.
Also, she was one of only a few people to have ever won all four of the Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards. She definitely deserves to be remembered as more than a pretty face people put on t-shirts, is what I’m sayin’.