Biography: This trajectory, from insecure star to committed goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, is the narrative of Spoto's latest book, a successor to similar works on subjects from Saint Francis of Assisi to Alfred Hitchcock.
The front cover image of Donald Spoto's elegantly written biography of Audrey Hepburn bears a posed publicity still of the star; a long white-gloved arm caressing some indeterminate object, her Givenchy gown emphasising her marmoreal skin, hair pulled back in a ribboned twist, her face is turned so that she is looking, almost anxiously, at the camera. On the back, a late-life shot finds a lined, unmade-up older woman smiling directly at us, flanked by two grinning African children, one with his hand resting on her knee.
Certainly the best-known of the celebrity biographers (he has also written a life of Jesus), Spoto's approach is notable for his refusal to sensationalise and for an ability to marshal filing cabinets of research into a readable whole.
His life of Audrey Hepburn begins with her titled Dutch mother's brief and inopportune marriages, firstly to a mysterious colonial and secondly to a ne'er do well Englishman with a taste for alcohol and other people's money. The latter was Hepburn's father, and the reason for her upper-class English tones. Years later he was traced back to Dublin where he had remarried; his daughter seems to have written him long and often intimate letters, though their relationship was based on little else. Instead she had to rely on the Baroness, a woman with little capacity for emotional expression who depended on other people to convey her feelings to her daughter. A child of the war, Hepburn's early years were spent in occupied Holland, where she nearly starved to death, an experience that Spoto returns to over and again and which he sees as defining her life. After appearing in a series of British musicals, Hepburn's breakthrough came when a woman in a wheelchair spotted her performing before the cameras in a forgettable Monte Carlo romp. The figure in the chair was the eccentric and distinguished French writer, Colette, whose novella Gigi was on the point of being adapted for the Broadway stage by Anita Loos. Certain that she had found her ingénue, Colette telegraphed the play's producers and, with little demur, Hepburn was cast. Almost simultaneously, Hollywood discovered on the front cover of a fashion magazine the face for which they had been looking. Playing a young princess who flees the constraints of royalty for one day of freedom, Hepburn won her only Academy Award for Roman Holiday (1953). To complete the coincidence of events, she agreed to marry the playboy millionaire James Hanson, who was to be the first of her unsuitable and somewhat older husbands.
Hepburn's early Hollywood successes marked her out as an object of childlike beauty; most frequently described as gamine or waiflike, in films from Sabrina (1954) to Funny Face (1957) to Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), she played roles that required her to be rescued by men of the world who were enchanted in equal measures by her combination of innocence and vulnerability. Off-screen, Hepburn longed only to be a mother; to her chagrin and with an increasing toll on her mental health, she endured a succession of stillbirths and miscarriages. An affair with William Holden nearly culminated in marriage, until his lover discovered that he was sterile. She ended the relationship immediately. Shortly after that, she married Mel Ferrar, a second rate actor-director, who took control of her career in an obsessively patriarchal manner. At least that marriage produced the longed-for child, and a second son was born out of her disastrous union with the Italian lothario, Andrea Dotti.
Lest it seem Audrey Hepburn was simply a victim of her beauty and her audiences' desires to project their rescue fantasies on her, Spoto charts the actor's growing control over her own image and her insistence on limiting the publicists' access to her private life. It is just that combination of fragility and defiance that informs one of Hepburn's most enduring roles, as Sister Luke in The Nun's Story (1959). It is impossible now even to imagine such a film being made, let alone it being the success that it and so many other of Hepburn's major productions were. As Hepburn herself realised, the kind of androgynous beauty that had made her such a startling new act in the wake of the luxuriant sexuality of Monroe was superseded from the late 1960s onwards by a new performative frankness that she could never emulate. So she went into retirement and devoted her life to rearing her children in the manner that only a world-famous star with a retinue of staff and a choice of Swiss chateaux can. Still, it was through her own children, and then her role as ambassador for UNICEF, for which she raised millions of dollars and travelled the disaster areas of the globe, that the actor seems to have found a sense of achievement that eluded her in her days of stardom. Her final marriage, to Robert Wolders, was also a compensation and if Spoto renders him more or less characterless, that comes as something of a relief after the accounts of Hepburn's previous spouses. Nevertheless, they all gathered around as Hepburn lay dying; Spoto, discreet to the last, does not presume to second-guess the content of their conversations.
Ruth Barton is O'Kane Senior Research Fellow in the School of Languages, Literatures and Film at UCD. Her most recent book, Acting Irish in Hollywood: From Fitzgerald to Farrell, is published by Irish Academic Press
Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn By Donald Spoto. Hutchinson, 288pp. £18.99