Audrey (2020) Movie Script

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I was not an actress.
When it came to movies, I was a dancer.
I didn't have any way for them to know
whether I could really act.
But they realized there
was enough there for them
as a human being, to draw out.
And I'm grateful because
I suppose the way I am
is what has brought me so
much good fortune, you know?
From the motion
picture capital of the world,
the academy of motion
picture arts and sciences,
26th annual academy awards.
And now, over to you live in Los Angeles.
Should I read it?
Should I read it?
I don't think I will.
Ladies and gentlemen in New York City,
miss. Audrey hepburn in Roman holiday.
It's too much.
I want to say thank you to everybody
who in these past months and years
have helped, guided
and given me so much.
I'm truly, truly grateful.
I'm terribly happy.
Today the name of Audrey hepburn
flashes from theater marquees.
From the covers of national magazines,
from column upon column
of newspaper rave notices.
For everybody is talking about
her sensational star debut
in Paramount's Roman holiday.
Audrey hepburn
was not like any other actor
or actress out there.
She just had magnetism.
People loved her.
She was a newcomer
that was so strong
and so impressive.
You became
world famous over one night
after having made Roman holiday.
I think that many of the girls here
would like to be a star like you.
Have you any advice to give to them?
The only advice I can give is that,
they must make sure they
want to be it enough
because as it's so often said,
hard work is never so hard
when it is done with love.
Audrey's look
with something brand new.
There were the girl next
door types like Doris day,
and then the sex bombs
like Marilyn Monroe.
There were wonderful
female stars at the time,
but there was nothing quite like her.
She created this type of woman
that really didn't exist.
That was her.
Audrey is an icon for people
from all over the world.
Her image, her style and the way of life.
That's her great beauty.
People love her and know her
because of her lovely face
or her smile.
But there was a real Audrey
that people don't know.
She's not only an icon on print.
Audrey's life was so much more than that.
There's a lovely phrase
in Arthur rubinstein's book.
Many years ago,
when he had a very, very
difficult beginning to his life.
He had to decide whether to
reject life or to love it.
And he said, I just decided
to love it unconditionally.
And I believe that.
Audrey's parents met in the Dutch indies.
Audrey's father was a diplomat.
And Audrey's mother, the
baroness at heemstra was there
because her father was a governor.
Audrey hepburn never mentioned it really,
but in her family, there
was this Dutch nobility.
My grandfather, Joseph ruston hepburn
was an aspiring aristocrat.
There's a typical twenties
formal portrait shot of him.
Showing him just as he was.
Always very well groomed
a small moustache,
slick black hair and nice suit.
He was an aspiring aristocrat
whose background was very fuzzy.
He made up some sort of lineage
that would have made him
a distant heir of the king of Scotland.
He thought highly of himself
and nothing really materialized.
When
they lived in the Dutch indies,
he felt that marxists, communists
were going to take over.
So they moved back to Belgium.
And that's when my
mother was born in 1929.
Audrey's father quickly embraced
the Belgium fascist party, the rexist.
And he was also vehemently anti-semitic.
Audrey's parents went to Nazi Germany,
and cheered on the marches.
They were very impressed
by the rejuvenation
of the German nation, under Nazi rule.
And Audrey's mother, even
penned a few articles
for magazines
really praising the Nazi regime.
That was 1935,
which is exactly when Audrey's
father abandoned his family
and moved to england where he became
an active member of the black shirts.
The British fascist party.
When the war broke out,
she was in a boarding school in the uk.
Not that far away from London,
where her father lived.
He did have visitation
rights, which he never used.
And so she was by herself,
and other children
on weekends were seeing their parents
and she ended up spending her summers
with workers that her mother found.
Her mother felt that it would be safer
for her to be in the Netherlands
because they thought that
england might be carpet bombed.
Her father actually
took her to the airport.
This is the last time that she saw him.
So that was September of 1939.
She flew on the last
plane that left the uk
and then into Amsterdam.
She changed her name, her first name.
She was adar. And not Audrey,
in order to not arouse suspicion
that she might be english.
I was 10 when the war broke out.
This was in September and in may
the Germans marched in to Holland.
The first few months,
we didn't know quite what had happened.
Had we known the first
six months of the war
that we were going to be
occupied for five years,
we might have all shot ourselves.
We thought it'll be over next week.
Holland was one of the worst
because we were occupied by the ss.
Not by just the military.
Everybody sort of just clammed
up and went underground
and you couldn't speak freely.
And you weren't allowed
to listen to radios
and we grew up that way.
Knowing that we were all prisoners.
There came a moment when we had to
live in the cellar
because parts of our house
kept being shot away.
We were sleeping on mattresses
and sitting there waiting
for the shooting to stop.
My uncles were taken from their homes
and shot.
One brother was sent to Germany.
The other one was always hidden.
My uncles were the first
hostages to be shot in Holland.
And it was actually the turning point
because from that day on
an underground was formed.
She was asked to take
messages for the resistance
in her shoes.
And it was the city telegram at the time,
the safest on a bike,
put a kid on the bike,
put a message in the insole of their shoes
and it's quick and
nobody's gonna stop kids.
She performed for the Dutch resistance,
not just to raise monies,
but also to entertain people
and get their minds off
the horrors that they were living through.
Ever since I was
a little girl in Holland
I wanted to be a ballet dancer.
That was my dream.
As a child already.
Ballet, ballet, ballet
is what I love most.
They would do plays and
little musical operettas
and trying to stay discrete
and not bring the attention
of the invading soldiers.
At the end of the performances,
nobody clapped their hands.
They just smile in the dark.
Dancing was the lifeline
throughout the war.
It helped to keep her from
looking at where she was.
There's that sense of dance
as a way to take flight.
Dance was a way for her to escape.
I was terribly
slim during the war
because little by little,
there was practically nothing to eat.
All children started to suffer
from malnutrition.
No provisions made, with
no food in the shops.
And that last winter, I mean,
nothing grows in the winter.
You can keep carrots and potatoes.
For just so long and some turnips
but we were running out of those.
And that was really very, very hard.
She survived the Dutch famine
on bread made of tulips.
And when they liberated her,
she was living in her
basement in the Netherlands
and the first unicef agents
that had been assembled
to provide aid to women
and children after the war,
they literally pulled
her out of the famine.
She would always talk
about how they arrived
and they handed her chocolate bar.
And like that was her turning point.
When we were liberated.
It was so exciting and that's
when life started again.
All the things you've
never had, never seen,
never eaten and never worn
started to come back again.
That was such a stimulus.
As soon as I could,
I wanted desperately to become a dancer
and I got a scholarship in
the rambert ballet school
in London.
I didn't have a dime and she took me in,
I lived in her house in a room
and ate meals in her kitchen
when she was out on tour with her company.
And I had months and months
of training in her school.
But because of the war
and interruption and malnutrition,
now I didn't get a really solid
couple of years of training
until I went to the rambert school.
It was late and I didn't have
anywhere near the technique
that girls my age had.
She talked to Marie rambert and Marie said,
all of those complications
are gonna add up to
taking away some
percentage of chance of you
to become a prima ballerina.
And of course she was devastated.
But she had no choice to
sort of cry over herself.
She had to keep moving.
I had no money,
and I had to get job
and I did get one for the musicals.
I plunged into show business in London.
It was the best cure.
I was in a chorus, in a big chorus room
with all the other girls
rehearsing and dancing
and doing twice nightly's
and from then on,
that was my life.
Who wants a ciggy?
- Hello sweetie?
- I was a dancer and
that's really what I wanted to do always.
I never wanted to become
an actress or never dared
to think in those terms.
Ooh really Alfred.
I became an actress because
I have to earn a living.
And I started doing little bits in movies,
to get the extra buck.
I watched every move you make.
I was in the south of
France doing a French movie
monte-Carlo baby.
And by chance, we were doing
a scene in the hotel de Paris
and she was there with her husband.
And she said, in very few words,
would I like to play gigi on Broadway.
Final curtain
on the big new hit, gigi.
And Audrey hepburn, the
young continental beauty
who's Broadway's latest star takes...
It was my break,
but I have two very big
breaks in the same month.
William wyler
came to england looking for an unknown.
He really ordered a lot of tests made
and I was one of them.
And that's the test that won me the part
and started a lovely career for me.
I was 12 years old when
I saw Roman holiday.
And it was a revelation.
I was a tomboy as were most of my friends
resisting the transition to lady-hood.
And you know all the...
Nowadays I guess then to0,
all these girls wanted to be princesses.
I never wanted to be a Princess.
So that was Audrey hepburn,
sort of abdicating her Princess-ship.
And it was just so exciting.
Gregory peck and Audrey herpburn
were a kind of unbeatable combination.
She's an explorer, she's an adventurer.
She cuts her hair, which is
already a huge emancipation.
She gets rid of the heavy burden
of the crown and the hair.
She's on the back of a
motorcycle with Gregory peck.
And it's just the ultimate expression
of self willed liberation.
She's active.
She's not waiting for the guy to come.
She goes back and forth from ugly duckling
to swan and from swan to ugly duckling.
So these are the sort of
fairytale roles that she plays
and incarnates just magnificently.
I'm going to that corner there and turn.
You must stay in the car and drive away.
She really hadn't been
training as an actress
but she'd been training to perform.
She had to draw on her
own sad and difficult
real life experiences.
So that we feel closer
to her, more familiar.
Out of nowhere,
this star was born in that movie.
When something
like that happens to you,
with all the paraphernalia
that comes with it.
Everybody wanted to interview
you and I was working
and burning the candle at both ends.
I was so new to it all.
I said yes to everything
and I was in a play
and doing interviews and television.
It was only four years before
that come out of Holland
and a long German occupation
where we hadn't been able to
keep up at all with pictures.
And I was way behind.
And there's so much I wasn't aware of.
So let alone think of me or future,
or I didn't know it was going
to lead even to another movie.
I received this extraordinary
Oscar, so early.
And I really didn't know what hit me.
Once I did Roman holiday,
the offers came in from Willy wyler again,
from Fred Zimmermann, from Billy Wilder.
Audrey was probably one
of the last movie stars
from the golden age of Hollywood.
What you got with all of those
movies stars at that period.
They were very much
like the characters
that they played.
That was the point.
She was given birth to her stardom
by the studio system,
that sort of the last great
moment of classical cinema.
Audrey was under contract
in the 50's and the 60's
when she did a number of
pictures at fort Paramount,
including "war and peace"
and "Sabrina"
which was her first picture with Wilder.
The very first day she came
on the set, she was prepared.
She knew her lines.
I did not have to squeeze it out of her.
Everybody fell in love with her.
I included.
She wasn't a Hollywood bombshell
that I think so much of the actresses
around that time were.
And suddenly she came
and she was like a lion,
her beautiful, big almond
eyes, her black raven hair.
And I think for Hubert,
that was something actually
he really worked towards
was accentuating the fact
that she had this incredible
graceful line in her body.
That was not typical of what
was out there at that point.
And in a way it became
quite ground breaking.
Hubert and Audrey met in
this very room that we're in.
This is the grand salon.
Hubert thought he was
meeting Catherine hepburn.
And so it was a really
surprising visit for him
because he was totally taken aback.
He said, but you're
not not who I expected.
And here was this absolute
petite, fragile, very beautiful,
very fine featured little curteous girl.
And I think he was not
completely enthralled
at the beginning.
But then she came and she
told him she wanted him
to do the costumes for her film Sabrina.
He was very reluctant, but over dinner,
she sort of charmed him and convinced him.
And the next day they started
collaborating for that film.
And it became a love affair.
I think between the two of them.
I went away.
Fashion came into my life
when I had my very, very
first haute couture dress
made by Hubert de givenchy
for a picture called sabirna
and I must say I wasn't disappointed.
The beauty of it was extraordinary
and the way it was made.
And I've always had a
love for pretty things,
pretty clothes.
I think what Hubert loved about Audrey was
she was almost like the girl next door
she was quite sophisticated actually.
I think she was quite well read.
She was a dancer.
She knew how to move.
They completely understood each other.
In so many ways I think
it was a complete surprise
to him to,
to dress someone like her.
She's incredibly petite, tiny, tiny frame,
but somehow he made
her through the clothes
through the line that he drew
on her body it just looks statuesque.
Hubert and I are very much alike.
We love the same things, and
we're hurt by the same things.
I think we're both sensitive.
There's a wonderful
French word, dpouille,
which means without ornament.
With everything stripped away.
There's a purity about his clothes,
but always with a sense of humor.
Hurbert would do
something terribly simple.
But there'll be just that one little bow
or little Rose or something
that will give it a little,
as I say, a sense of humor, a little fun.
Audrey and givenchy invented a style.
Audrey's style.
When an artist meets another artist,
the best things come out
and they were like that.
When you actually see still shots of her,
she knows how to hold
herself in the clothes.
And I think she was
showing her personality
through the clothes
and the fact that they had
this incredible connection
made that so much more unique,
particularly at that time,
because I think it was a very rare thing.
There were almost no Hollywood actresses
that had this intimate relationship
with a designer back in the 50s'.
And so they really pioneered something.
My greatest anguish was always,
who would I be good enough in the scene?
Would I be able to do the job?
I would dress but to do a good job
and to know the scene well,
and if the director afterwards said
print it. That was lovely Audrey.
That's all I wanted.
That she was called an artist of love.
I think it's totally fitting.
She was learning love firsthand.
I think part of it is she
had lacked love as a child.
Her mother was harsh and uncomplimentary.
She made her feel ugly. I think.
So there was that complex she had.
And yet it didn't embitter her
or sidetrack her, or make her defensive.
Instead, she kept opening up.
And Sabrina of course, she's
just young and passionate
that she's a teenager
and teenagers are always
going to die for love.
But she really is.
She really sets about it.
She's the one who admits love.
It's like she's brave enough
to risk rejection and open
her heart before the man does.
And it's because the men are cynical.
Or they don't believe in love.
And she's the one that
kind of awakens them.
David, would you like to kiss me?
- Would 1?
- Yes.
A nice steady kiss.
She was clearly seeking
love everywhere she went
in all of her films and
in her life too, I think.
Hello, I am Audrey hepburn.
Ondine is a very beautiful love story
in which Mel ferrer and I appear together.
Mel plays the knight errant
and I play a water sprite
and it's a very gay part.
Greg peck and my father were best friends.
And when Greg comes back from Rome,
he says you have to meet this girl.
I just did this film with.
And they meet and the rest is history.
I think they found each other
and they adored each other.
And were very happy.
They were both very lovable people.
My father was a brilliant
educator, spoke five languages,
had also a semi European background.
And they were very similar in many ways.
They were both very strong people.
They consulted with
each other on everything
and he collaborated with her
and this is what they
talked about over dinner.
What do you think of the script?
This is what I'm thinking.
For this next outfit for this next movie.
This is the camera man.
What about the music?
How do you feel about this and that?
Mel was a good actor.
And he attached himself to
projects and got them made
because he was a producer
in his own right.
He was really a kind and caring person.
And he loved her deeply.
They were pretty business
smart in terms of how
her brand needed to be or
the kind of career choices
that she needed to make.
There were scenes in
funny face that I remember.
I loved doing because they went to music
and having originally been a dancer
not a good one, but I was a dancer
and I love all the musical numbers.
I was very apprehensive
about doing that pitch.
I do remember the first time
I met Fred Astaire and that was on set.
I knew how good I should be
to dance with Fred Astaire.
I knew I wasn't.
I had a very slender kind of technique
and I wasn't a great technician at all.
And to be cast opposite
him was terribly exciting,
but I was very apprehensive.
In many of her roles.
She could come across as a frivolous girl,
but she really finds the sort
of gravity in those roles.
In funny face the away she dances
and she completely deconstructs
what dance is about.
This is the lightness that she brings.
All right, go.
Move, move
she obviously was gifted
on so many levels.
Her incredible abilities
to perform for the camera,
be a Princess or a librarian
and becoming a supermodel.
My grandfather was Richard avedon
to Doe avedon.
My grandfather was photographing
those who perform with their emotions.
Audrey was the ultimate beauty,
both internally and externally.
She was obviously such
a gift to the camera
that he was astonished.
And when you look at the
photographs my grandfather
took of Audrey,
I think you'd definitely get a sense
of what kind of person she was.
And perhaps that's why she
was this devastating gift
because she gave so much,
and there was so much range,
whether that be in a stream of sorrow
and romance and desire,
or just absolutely elated with wonder,
she and avedon were on
the same wavelength.
So he didn't have to tell her what to do.
She knew what to do.
She was made of so many
different dimensions
and experiences in life
from the suffering she endured
to the joy she's still experienced in life
and the artistry she maintained.
If you actually go through the archive
and you look at what has been
the most important dresses
that people recognize
so much of it is the
work Hubert did with her.
The dress from funny face
was one of the most iconic
fashion movie moments
of that era.
He created something so
timeless, but so iconic.
And if I actually think back to myself,
when I first saw Audrey hepburn movies,
I fell in love with her
and the way she looked in those movies.
And of course the breakfast
at Tiffany's dress
is one of the most iconic
dresses of all time.
That moment, when she
steps out of the taxi
at the beginning of the film,
she's got every symbol of
Paris with her in a way.
She has a croissant in her hand, pearls
her hair in an up do,
and this incredible black silhouette,
just so refined and so elegant.
It became a symbol of
the ultimate black dress.
And she became an icon from that.
Everyone is now thinking
no one had any singularity or eccentricity
or individuality, bullshit.
Was there anyone who had more
of that than Audrey hepburn.
I don't even wanna own anything
until I can find a place where
me and things go together.
It was a real performance.
She captured that kind of crazy,
the sane girl that Truman
capote wrote about.
She personified it very brilliantly
and she wasn't really like that.
But she nailed it.
It's one of her best performances.
In fact, I think it's the
most iconic photo of her.
It still is Holly golightly.
It seems to be used most
often to define her.
What sort of a girl is she?
She is a, what they call in
America these days a kook.
How does that mean?
It's spelt with a k I believe.
Which is a dizzy gay
type of girl.
Anything like you?
I'm not quite that way. No.
Truman capote actually thought
that she was too elegant.
And he wanted someone who
looked like they could be
a woman of the night and
not someone who was elegant
and graceful
and truly stood out as
the class in the room.
As opposed to the arm piece.
She takes a story
which is meant for Marilyn Monroe
and elevates it out of the typecasting
and transforms that part
into what it became.
She really also like gave this
Holly golightly character,
completely different texture.
She was a call girl like basically.
Any gentleman with the slightest cheek
will give a girl a $50
bill for the powder room.
And Audrey gave her this depth.
I'm not Holly. I'm not lula Mae either
I don't know who I am.
I'm like cat here.
We're a couple of no name slabs.
We belong to nobody, and
nobody belongs to us.
We don't even belong to each other.
Moon river was perfect song
written for Audrey hepburn.
Jwaiting round the bendj
she sang very beautifully,
but she did not have a large range.
It has this melancholic feeling to it.
But it's hopeful at
the end of the rainbow,
you're going to get there.
After the screening,
they're sitting with the studio
head and one of them says,
oh, and by the way, that bloody
song moon river has to go.
And she jumped out of the chair
and said over my dead body,
because she knew that that song had legs
and she could feel and she
know what she's invested
into the performance.
This is what went down in history
as one of the most famous moment
of breakfast at Tiffany's.
So she had a sense of what was important
what wasn't maybe a greater
sense than some producers.
She was a lioness.
She was not handed this.
She's been described as the
iron fist and the velvet glove.
And you have to understand
she came from that strong
victorian background.
Then the ballet, all
those years of training,
it's arduous hard, hard
physical and mental work.
And so she needed that
strength and that culture
and that background to survive
in the world of Hollywood,
where you have to fight for
everything that you believe in.
She had to fight was
givenchy to sublimate
the little black dress and
take everything that wasn't
bolted on off of it, whether
it was a bow or whatever,
because she understood also
the medium and the camera
and what it sees and what is necessary.
What's not necessary.
She wasn't just an actress.
She was a movie star.
You don't think of her
as a complex actress,
but there's something
deeply complex about her.
I love you but I'm not
just lula Mae anymore.
In breakfast at Tiffany's,
she was this incredible
incandescent figure.
She meant so much more than
just beautiful, stylish.
She meant to curiosity.
Did you ever read it?
It's absolutely marvelous.
Self-determination she's
discussed as a fashion icon,
but that's a narrow
definition of what she is
because she exceeds that.
She's not like all the
stars you felt in some way,
she had more freedom.
You didn't feel like she was a slave
of the studio system at all.
That probably more than anything
is what makes her great.
I think more than almost
any star I can think of.
And this is saying something
that you can't take your eyes off of her
when she's in the room.
My dream was to become a ballet dancer
and it really stayed it
for many, many years.
I wanted to be a dancer more
than anything in the world.
But this career
has brought me so much
happiness and good fortune.
It means so much to me.
People loved her.
Being around her was like
traveling with a rock star
the first time I met
Audrey, I didn't know that
she was one the biggest
movie stars in the world.
She was this really nice
lady who came to our house.
Audrey, she was so normal.
So like any other person,
you forget she was a movie star.
My son Giovanni was six year old.
I remember him asking me mommy,
but it's true then Audrey
she's a movie star.
And I say, yes,
she is a movie star and very famous.
And he was disappointed he said,
why does she not live like a movie star?
Why she live like that?
Because the way of Audrey
living was the most simple
you can imagine.
The two times that I
escorted her at the oscars,
she presented best actor and best picture.
And no matter how early we
left, we were always late.
And just because of traffic
and would have to get out walk
walk the last two blocks
with people in the crowd screaming.
That's Audrey hepburn.
At that time,
all the late night talk
shows would like to book her.
And the king of late
night was Johnny Carson.
Most celebrities were petrified
of going on Johnny Carson
because he was the king
and he could make or break their career.
But Johnny Carson was so
intimidated by Audrey hepburn.
He could barely talk.
What?
You think that we should hold hands,
while we talk about my husband?
She was the only person he was afraid of
because she was such a big star.
I'm still understanding the level of fame.
And it's a unique kind of
fame that in my opinion,
so few people have
achieved and maintained.
She had like, obviously
the strength of character
that was so appealing and
you couldn't just help,
but fall in love with her.
But she also had this
incredible vulnerability.
The affection that I gained
by success, if you like,
and by the pictures I made,
has always continued
and made me very happy.
Success is also very much
in the eyes of the observer.
It's not that I get up every morning
and look in the mirror and
say, well, what a success I am.
It's just me.
I'm not your ideal
person to be a performer.
You can be shy and be a dancer
much better than you can be an actress.
I've always gone to see my rushes
because I've felt I should
because I thought maybe there's something
I can still correct.
And if I've been successful,
the audience, the people see
something that I don't see.
Good afternoon, professor
Higgins, are you quite well?
What has always helped me a
great deal are the clothes.
Would you care for some tea?
How kind of you to let me come.
It was often an enormous help
to know that you look the part.
How do you do?
Walking down those
stairs for the first time
beautifully dressed in my fair lady.
The rest wasn't so tough anymore.
Miss Doolittle you look beautiful.
Thank you colonel pickering.
I'm terribly self conscious about myself
and clothes always give me a
great deal of self-confidence.
Not bad at all.
I think she really was insecure
and she fought to kind of project
a perfectly curated image
of herself because of it.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
and this is something I can't see.
I see the problems when
I get up in the morning
to do my best to look well.
I would have liked to
not have been so tall.
I'd like to have had smaller feet.
I'd like to have had more figure.
I'd like to have a smaller nose.
I'd like to been blonde and
I'd like to change everything.
This is a very interesting
moment in her life
where she's very fragile in many ways.
And it's weeks before the
release of my fair lady.
And she was accused of stealing
the part from Julie Andrews.
Cause she had held the part on Broadway.
When they shot the movie,
it was extremely physically difficult.
She took all those singing classes
and then she was told
that she would be dubbed.
Jyou'll be sorry but your
tears will be too lights
the studio, worried that her voice
compared to Julie Andrews voice
would be a step down.
Just you wait Henry
Higgins, just you wait.
So they had marni Nixon do
the singing of the role.
Jack Warner made fun of her
when she complained about it
saying that even the dog
rintintin was dubbed.
She felt that for the first time,
the press was going to turn
on her and that created this
anxiety and added insecurity.
She felt that something was
starting to weigh on her.
She was a huge star,
but there was this deep wound.
My parents
divorce when I was six.
It certainly stayed with
me for the rest of my life.
My father leaving us left me insecure,
for life perhaps.
She adored her father.
There's one photo of my
mother with her father.
The photo is just a candid shot,
probably taken by her mother,
but you can tell how much she adored him.
And then he disappeared one day.
My mother explained very sweetly
that he'd gone away on a trip.
She didn't think he was coming back.
I thought my mother was
never going to stop crying.
She'd sob through the nights,
I would hear her sobbing in the next room.
And I would just try and be with her.
I missed him terribly from
the day he disappeared.
As a child, you can't quite understand.
That sense of helplessness.
The strangeness of it too.
Not really understanding and
just knowing daddy's gone away.
That was the first big
blow I had as a child.
It was one of the traumas that
a left very deep Mark on me.
She really felt throughout her whole life,
the lack of her father.
And I know that's something
that she really struggled with
that wasn't really fixed through
her amorous relationships at all.
There were many difficult
times with the partners
that she did have.
The question of whether Audrey
was looking for a father
figure in her relations
has been discussed.
And Mel ferrer sort of guided her career
in the way that's almost print like.
She and Mel had a long,
fairly happy marriage,
but they sort of drifted apart.
They were happy and
lived the life of Riley
for the first decade or
longer of their relationship.
I have wonderful memories
of the two of them,
she in a house dress.
And he's a very elegant candlelight
and then dancing to record player,
but they lived and worked
together everyday for those 17 years.
And my father was a very
demanding and difficult man.
And I think that also played
a role in slowly eroding
the relationship.
She had a great career,
but I think her private
life wasn't that lucky.
There's a sense that
anxiety and the insecurities
that she had plenty of
actually came from those
insolvable questions
and the departure.
Audrey expressed her desire to
see her father to Mel ferrer
in 1964, after 25 years of total absence.
Curiosity took over.
I wanted to know where he was,
whether he was still alive
and through the red cross,
I found where my father
lived which was an island.
She had not seen her father
since that day of 1939
before world war ll
a few days before the war broke out.
And then she was this huge star reunited
with a total stranger
who had abandoned her
in this nondescript place,
accompanied by her husband who
was drifting away from her.
And when she met with her father,
she never asked for answers
and that she could not
demand anything from him.
When she was telling me
the story, she was crying,
she said he was so cold.
He did not receive her.
And she said that really hurt her.
That kind of emotional
state and the realization
that whatever she'd expected,
he would not give her.
In spite of everything,
Audrey decided to forgive him.
And that there was no point in trying
to right the wrongs
or trying to have him
admit to what he'd done.
There is a sense of her insecurities
that translated into
her relations with men.
And the fear of being of being abandoned,
certainly was something that
she went through in her relationships.
No two people are ever perfect.
If there's enough friendship and love,
you overcome it or whatever.
But obviously when a
marriage doesn't work anymore
then everything becomes destructive.
Audrey was not very happy
with men. That's all.
I'm going to California next
week to talk further about it
- with or without your wife?
- I'll go without.
She's not ready to do anything like that.
Audry divorced Mel in '68,
but the marriage was already over.
My father spent the rest of his life
regretting having lost that relationship.
That was the relationship of his life
and the woman of his
life. No doubt about it.
I hung on in there as long as I could.
For the child's sake, is why we hang on.
Also out of respect for
the marriage and for love
of the person that you
certainly once loved.
You always hope that if
you love somebody enough
that everything will be right
and things will come together again,
but it isn't always true.
I wanted to be a mother.
Ever since I was a child, I loved babies,
and when I was grown up I was
going to have lots of babies.
I think that has been a
conducting theme in my life.
It's what's made my decisions always.
And because I wanted it so much
and wanted to enjoy very much,
and not rip myself away from all the time,
I started withdrawing.
They'd made "wait until dark'
when Sean had reached the age of six
and he had to go to school,
but no longer travel with me.
And I was just missing him.
The studio did want me to
either have me wear dark glasses
or have a scar near an eye.
Be blind in some way.
Which worried me terribly.
I'd call home and he'd have a fever.
And he was so far away
and I missed him terribly.
I longed for this child.
And it just made me too unhappy.
So I, more or less quit
movies down to stay home.
Once she had had her family,
she had kind of reached her apex.
She really didn't want that life.
She really wanted to be with her family.
She just wanted to live
in an anonymous life.
Unheard of really.
She turned her back on Hollywood
and movies for 10 years
and 10 important years.
I cannot think of many people in Hollywood
who gave up a career,
let alone her career.
She was sitting in it. She saw it.
She was the first actress
to get a million dollars
together with Elizabeth Taylor
and the red carpets being rolled out
and the parts being
offered and she stops it.
It may have been near the peak
of her career when she said
I'm choosing to put family
over another great role,
which she was offered
when she was always at
the top of anyone's list
of leading ladies.
But because of the difficult
life she led as an adolescent
and as a teenager,
family came first over anything else.
I don't want to be made to sound virtuous.
It was a very knowing,
and if you like selfish decision,
it's what made me happy.
It was to stay home with my children.
It was not a sacrifice because
I thought I should take care
of my children.
The feeling of family
is terribly important.
I think it's essential.
I learned as a child that
it's terribly important
for a child to have a father.
Having my father cut off,
or cut himself off,
I was desperate.
If I could have just seen him regularly,
I would have felt he loved me
and I would have had a father.
And I tried desperately to
avoid it for my children.
You become very insecure about affection,
and terribly grateful for it
and you have an enormous
desire to give it.
I think she had to kind
of prove to herself
that unconditional love was possible.
I think she was just chasing
that her in her whole life.
In 1969,
the common friend of Andrea and Audrey
invited them on a cruise.
And then they met and they
decided to get married.
At the beginning of the marriage,
she was so pleased to
be the wife of a doctor.
I remember Audrey helping Andrea
to prepare the dose of
lithium for the patient.
She was so passionate about that.
In 1970 Luca was born
and we moved to Rome where
she lived until '83 or '84.
Audrey and Andrea.
They have a very strong bond,
even if they were so different
from each other so different,
but the bond was very strong
in between the two of them.
I knew Andrea dotti, he was
one of the Italian friend
when Andrea married Audrey
we became immediately friend.
Audrey was my neighbor
when they lived in Rome
in early 70's
and my mother was a
great friend of Audrey's.
She loved Rome.
She had an unpretentious house there
filled with flowers and
she loved being in Rome
and Rome loved her.
There were many areas where we could meet.
It could be the vegetable
shop, the butcher.
She just put a pair of pants and tee shirt
and she would go shopping
as everybody else.
It was 1972
and we rent a very simple house
in a place named bulgari.
There were a little house on the beach
and we shared one of
this house with Audrey.
Audrey was married with Andrea
and little Luca was with them.
Sean came to visit from time to time.
She adore her two children.
She really was in love with them
and she loved Andrea.
Audrey was so happy.
But Andrea had
a very destructive part of himself,
he was a person with a
complicated personality.
In a way he was the serious doctor.
He was very professional.
He was a psychiatric.
He was really good.
And in other end, he was the
typical Roman, a young man.
He was committing a lot of adultery
and he was photographed with
over 200 different women.
By this one, Italian paparazzi.
It was devastating, totally devastating.
And Audrey was suffering a lot.
She told me I suffered so much.
But surely know the
doctors never take care
of their own families and
least of all themselves.
They're great with their patients,
but they don't want to
take care of their family.
Your heart just breaks, that's all.
Men are human beings with
all the frailties women have.
Perhaps they are more
vulnerable than women.
I think you can hurt a man so easily.
You cannot judge, you
cannot point fingers,
you cannot put anybody in a mould.
You just got to be lucky
enough to find somebody
who you can satisfy,
and then who pleases you, if you're lucky.
I met Andrea. When I visited in Rome,
Audrey was under bed rest with Luca.
At that time the doctor
said, just go to bed
early in your pregnancy.
So we said like, come on,
we'll go out to a club.
So he took me clubbing in Rome,
which I didn't think
was the greatest idea.
You should see the pictures from Audrey.
In that time, she lost a little
bit of light in her eyes.
I really couldn't understand
why such a sweet lady
like her had to find herself
with a man that wouldn't deserve her,
wouldn't understand her.
She wanted to do her
best to become a acquainted
with the people in Rome.
And the people in Rome
they have a mentality
very different of Audrey.
Very, very different to her.
They were gossiping,
they were superficial.
So it was difficult for her to understand.
When my second son was born
and I was at that time living in Rome,
I could take him
nowhere, not to a park,
not down the street,
not put him on a terrace
without paparazzi.
She is very private.
And also she was very
very angry with the press.
Like people climbing trees and photograph.
Everybody wanted to have a picture of her.
They didn't even give her
freedom in her own house.
Audrey's life was affected
by people that like
wanted to steal her privacy.
And this is something nobody can bear.
It's not something you wish
for your family to have
your private life always in front page.
I was with Audrey, we went to do shopping
and a woman from the public approached me
and said is that Audrey hepburn?
And I was about to say yes
then I saw Audrey she became pale.
And she stared at me saying no, no, no.
Off course I said, no, no
she's not Audrey hepburn.
She just looked like her.
Now she was almost shaking
and she said thanks god.
You're no idea what can happen.
I mean, she was terrified.
I think her life was difficult,
in her marriage.
And I felt that she
didn't really wanna act
too much anymore.
And so I was thrilled that
I had her for this picture.
When she stepped in front of the camera,
she was the ultimate professional.
And then when I said cut,
she became Audrey with the cigarettes.
She was rather nervous. She smoked a lot,
very sweet but anxious, fragile.
I knew the marriage was a problem.
And that she wasn't at her happiest with
that marriage at all.
She was persuaded to go
on with this marriage
especially because they
have Luca and he wanted
to succeed in the marriage.
But the in the end it was impossible.
I was told that
Audrey's getting another divorce
and it didn't surprise me.
She struggled with the
idea of a perfect family,
a perfect housewife's life,
very simple things that make life easy.
I don't think she had that.
Everything she had to
little bit fight for.
Having a miscarriage is heart-rendig.
Certainly one of the most
traumatic experiences I had.
But so is divorce.
It's probably one of the worst experiences
a human being can go through.
I think when you have
problems and so forth,
you can sense a loneliness,
because it is you that has to get it done
or you that has to make the decision.
We all have an innate loneliness,
because finally when the
chips are down you are alone.
You know, my dad said
about my grandmother,
that the best kept secret about
Audrey was that she was sad.
Not really. It really makes
me sad to think about,
like I think she,
I really think she just wanted
love and to be loved and,
I think she got, I did think
she got that in her life,
but I think she didn't get
it from a lot of people.
For the for the woman who was
the most loved in the world
to have such a lack of love is so sad.
There was peace
and there is quietness
just call them.
She could take a very positive energy
and she could be at home.
And just with the nature and
very away from Hollywood,
the problems with paparazzi.
The name of la paisible
means in French quietness
la paisible was very
beautiful house, old farm,
totally restored in a beautiful residence.
Built in the 18th century in Switzerland,
in '84 Luca who went to boarding school
at which point she left Rome
and moved permanently to Switzerland.
After a full life of working
ever since she could remember,
it's a welcome thing
to be able to get away
and be in a restful and peaceful place.
It was such a charming, beautiful house.
It was the house of her dream.
She told me, I want just to
be relaxed and to be quiet.
That's why she turned off so
many proposition for movie.
She was not the star
that people gawked at.
If she walked down the
street in New York City,
people would go crazy.
But in Switzerland she
was just another person.
I only have one life, which is me,
my family, my children.
I personally do very
little publicity as such
so that I can have a real life,
a private one if you like,
but just an everyday ordinary life.
Our family started living in la pausible
since the very beginning of
their relation with Audrey.
My mother was the private cook of Audrey
and they cooked a lot together.
My parents were close to her
because we lived all together.
My father was the private gardener,
Audrey and my father was
totally devoted to the garden.
And she was so proud to be able
to cook her own vegetables,
coming from the gardens.
I love that house. I love the garden,
the fruit trees and everything grows there
and I have my dogs.
I don't know anything
much about gardening,
but I love to mess around in the garden.
I find it very pleasant, very
relaxing, a good therapy.
I look back with enormous
happiness on my career.
But there's a time for everything.
And I think at this point in my life
you can't beat it.
I'm a very lucky girl.
I've been often through hell,
but I've always always
come out at the other end.
Either somebody helped
me, or something happened.
Robbie's a living example of that.
Robert was the companion of merle oberon
and when merle died,
she left all the possession to Robert.
So Robert decide
to put all the jewelry
of merle in auction
for charity.
And at this auction,
Robert and Audrey met.
We were both very, very unhappy
and we did talk about our unhappiness.
I was in one of the worst periods
at the end of my marriage.
So we both cried into our beers.
He's very loving, he's
a very affectionate man.
I can trust him, I trust his love.
I never fear that I'm losing it.
He reassures me in every way.
They were never married
but I really think that they
had that love for each other,
just truly for who they were.
Robert was what Audrey needed.
Kindness, companion, presence,
and safety.
It's curious, we found each other
both with our Dutch heritage,
but it's given something very
special to our relationship.
It adds to the intimacy
of our loving each other
and of our friendship.
We like the same things,
and we like the same life.
We love a quiet life, we love
the country, we love our dogs.
And everything we do together is such fun.
We're very happy together.
My mother had told me
Audrey she was so happy
and she explained to my family
how I met a fantastic men
and she was wondering about what my sister
will think to have a new man imagine.
So she she asked my mother,
what do you think is not a problem?
They loved to stay at my mother's house.
There was a wing added for my grandmother
and that was called Audrey's suite.
They would come down
and sit in their kitchen
and have coffee and talk about menus.
And who do you want to invite for dinner.
And always a lot of love there.
She was very, very happy
and she wanted to have a
peaceful moment of her life.
Her cousin was the Dutch console to Macau
and he'd invited her to come and join
this beautiful concert
that he would put together
for unicef.
She said, why don't you say
a few words about children,
about your experience in the war,
which she did in front of the full room.
And after she spoke, it
turns out the head of unicef,
Jim Grant, was in the
audience and he approached us.
How would you feel about
being a full time ambassador
for unicef.
I had looked forward to a period
finally after all the
traveling that I've done,
since I was a child
to one day be able to retire there
and take care of my garden and the dogs
and everything I love,
that's my idea of heaven,
but I'm moving around
the world once again,
but I'm happy to do it
because for the children
I'd go to the moon.
I have known unicef all my life
and it's a marvelous happening for me
that they're allowing me to do this.
She was happy to support.
She was proud and happy.
She was offering her
noteriety to a good cause.
I think all the love that
she showed to children
and to mothers around the world,
I think it was a way of
healing for herself too.
She did live through the war
and it is because she knew not
just the hunger of the body,
but the hunger of the soul
that she was able to
connect to these children.
The first thing I remember
after our liberation in Holland
was the red cross and unicef coming in
and filling all the empty
buildings that they could find.
With food and clothing and medication.
I was suffering from a rather high degree
of malnutrition when the war ended.
So god knows, I know the value of food.
I think my whole life has
been formed by those memories.
As a child.
I knew about this side of life,
so much suffering and so much poverty.
Those images have never, never left me.
But I think perhaps the
most important thing,
which I carried through life
of that particular period was
as things got worse,
there's something marvelous about humanity
is under circumstances like that,
you need each other more.
It's the fact that it's
left me with this voice,
this curiosity, people have
still to see me to talk to me,
which I can use for the good of children.
- Where do I go?
- You can go back here.
Go back here.
What I really am as a messenger
if you like for unicef.
There's so much involved apart from seeing
and meeting the media and
talking to people and in general,
it's advocacy for the needs of a child.
And there's so many children.
So there's lots to do.
Audrey took very seriously the commitment.
And before any mission,
she studied the situation.
She studied politically
and she got very involved
with all the social problem
and against their will to be peaceful.
She started to be involved in
this very stressing mission.
At the end of the war, she
saw a society and a promise
that we would never do this again.
And that we were putting
safeguards to prevent that.
And now she's propelled 35 years later
and finds herself in a camp in Somalia.
In September of 1992,
I was in Somalia reporting
for the associated press
about the famine that
was gripping the country.
Audrey was visiting programs
that unicef was involved in
for malnourished children.
In a place like Somalia,
you could see that
there really was not enough food to help.
And I think she was very upset
that there was so much death.
Then she realized the vastity,
the tragedy of what we've seen.
In a sense you are marked from that
and you want to go back
and back and back again.
In a way is a sort of addiction?
I knew that she was roiling
in anxieties and things.
She wanted to relieve pain
but she couldn't.
She was mad at the fact
that this was being allowed
in the 20th century,
after the deprivations
that she lived through
because of a world war.
We're not in a world war.
And there's no reason for
children who be hungry anywhere.
To see small children just
die in front of your eyes
because they're starving.
It's just is so totally unacceptable.
And I'm filled with a rage at ourselves.
I don't believe in collective guilt,
but I do believe in
collective responsibility.
I think from the moment that
you've been in the field,
so to speak,
from the minute you've seen
a child gasping for air.
And in his last moments,
you rush home and do
what you can about it.
I'm Audrey hepburn.
This is an urgent appeal
for the children of...
She was an altruist woman.
And she believed that
the base of everything
is to educate children
and to take care of them.
And she gave so much devotion to children.
I would go to many countries
and we would meet between
and she would want to know,
what did you see in Mali?
What did you see in Somalia?
So she always wanted to
know what's going on.
She wanted to go to Bangladesh
because she said that
everybody is giving up on Bangladesh
because they have the flood
every year during monsoon
and the landslides.
So she said,
those are the people I'd
like to go and support.
She was trying everything to involve
important people to their cause.
She showed up once in
front of the us congress
asking for an additional funding
for a particular emergency
and got the $60 million
in one hour from them.
That showed how extraordinarily
powerful she still was.
She used her name for something good.
If everybody did that,
the world would be a little bit better.
She was selfless she didn't stop.
She just wanted to go on
and complete her mission.
Robert used to tell me,
I wish they would give some time for her
between this and that
unicef would say,
I think it'll be good
if you went to Sudan.
So she wanted to go.
And I was concerned too. And
I would ask her sometimes,
she said, no, no, no, I'm tough.
I can take it. I'll go.
So she went,
she would say,
sometimes I even feel
whether it's doing any good.
I would tell her the same
thing as a photo journalist.
Sometimes I wonder if
anything is happening
from my photographs.
But then each time she went
and did a promotional thing,
unicef always said they got
more than a million dollars
because of her appearance
in any of the talk shows or TV shows.
So that's what made her happy.
She joined unicef and five years later,
unicef had doubled in size.
And I don't think this had
happened before since the war.
Dignity and love is what
we always talked about,
I think she struggled to find love.
And I think that's probably the reason why
she is so emphasizes on love.
With all the sufferings
that she went through.
She missed a part of that
kind of love that she expected
and she wanted.
And that's why I think
she wants to share that
with the children.
She would always say, I love you.
And she will never hold back.
She was so compassionate about
children who are suffering.
She truly loved humanity.
Humanitarian means human welfare
and responding to human suffering.
That's finally what politics should be.
I think perhaps with time,
instead of there being a politicalization
of humanitarian aid, there'll
be a humanization of politics.
I dreamed the day that
it would be all one.
We cannot afford to give up.
We have the resources we have the time
and we must have the love
to take care of these
millions of children.
Well, I understood that
something was going on
one week in particular
because Audrey had a walk in the garden
and my father was working in the garden
and he ask Audrey when are
you going to come again
to help me?
And she said I will help you,
but never as I helped you before.
I will help you but differently.
When we were in Somalia together,
we were taking pills for
malaria and they make me sick.
So I said to Audrey,
I think I going to give up
this laurium because I'm sick.
And she said, I'm thinking myself,
I have a lot of pain in my stomach.
And I think it is the pill of malaria.
I give up also.
But it was not the malaria pills
that they gave her all this
pain in the stomach there.
She definitely
knew something was wrong
and she never talked about it.
And she kept it to herself.
For unicef,
I went to Sarajevo to cover a mission
on this city was sieged.
And I was there two months
without no contact with anybody
because we are in the siege.
And after two months, I got
hold of a telephone line.
So I call her house and,
and Giovanna answered.
And I say, Giovanna give me madam.
And Giovanna say, Mara senora is not here.
You don't know is all
over on all the press,
she's very sick as she is in Los Angeles.
I said no. I no idea.
Giovanna kept crying. And I was frozen.
So I called Robert and
he says, she has a cancer
and say, she's on chemo.
She said, no, no chemo.
So when you say no chemo,
I knew the situation was really bad.
My mother was invited to
fly with her to Switzerland
if she chose to.
But my mother said no, I'll
say goodbye to you here.
I want to see you leaving
with a smile on your face.
Between the two of them.
She knew it was a...
They would not be seeing each other again.
Nobody thought it was something so bad
and so fast.
She was very peaceful.
And usually you are afraid,
but she wasn't.
She was very sick.
And she asked me how I felt.
She had something in her heart.
Otherwise you don't react like this
in the last moments of your life.
She was in her bedroom
and we were all standing around her.
I gave her last kiss.
And this was the last time I saw her, yes.
My mother died January
20th, 1993 at 8:00 pm.
On how to take care of the pain medication
and change her dressings.
I would sit in the wicker chair
next to her bed in the
last few weeks of her life.
And I would sit there
and sort of doze off.
And then she'd wake up in
the middle of the night.
And we talked about those
things that mattered to her.
I think she always felt
throughout her life that
she had shortcomings.
She felt that the mistake is to sit there
and forever hold a grudge
one way or the other.
She had to make peace with life
because she didn't have a choice.
She often said that it was a
fortune not to have a choice
to have to move forward.
As a child, I was taught,
it was bad manners to draw
attention to yourself,
and never ever to make
a spectacle of yourself.
I then went on to make
a rather nice living
doing just that.
Audrey hepburn was most
certainly revolutionary.
The legacy of artistry.
The legacy of joy,
she came from so much intensity.
She definitely stood
for something timeless
that I don't think will ever get old.
And even today, I think
she's still inspiring.
She's an utter icon.
She's everywhere all the time.
And so in a way, part
of her is still here.
Her legacy is still here.
She most certainly took trauma
and transmuted it into love.
A lot of people don't receive love
and they grow into being,
really unhappy and spiteful.
But I think she was so
much better at loving
because of it now and loving those people
who really need it.
The love she did not get,
she transformed into a greater
sense of giving and of love.
And this is, I guess, why
is she so loved to this day.
She's gone through difficult moments,
but her humanity and her way
of being grateful to her life.
She wanted to share that with others
and she found the way.
She said at one point
that the 1992 Christmas
was the best Christmas she ever had
because she said that she
was sure that we loved her.
She was a person who was able to love.
She loved very much Robert
and she loved her children of course.
And by the end of her life,
she loved herself.
At the end of her life, she
described people in the room.
That these were the
people on the other side
that were gonna take her from here.
She said you cannot see them
but they're sitting right there
and they're waiting for me.
Perhaps the most important thing
which I carried through life
is that whatever I've suffered
has helped me make later on.
And when I love, I love unconditionally.