She played Holly Golightly. She danced through the streets of Rome. She wore that hat in My Fair Lady and made it look effortless. Audrey Hepburn was one of the most admired women Hollywood ever produced.
But the life she wanted most had very little to do with any of that.
According to People, those who studied and knew Hepburn have shared new reflections on the love life she kept remarkably private. What emerges is a picture of a woman who reportedly dreamed of a peaceful home, children, and a lasting relationship, something far quieter than the spotlight she lived under.
She married twice and had other important relationships along the way. But through it all, author Pamela Keogh says discretion was one of Hepburn’s defining qualities. She simply did not let the world in.
The outline was always public. She married actor and director Mel Ferrer in 1954, and their son Sean was born in 1960. That marriage ended in 1968. The following year she married Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist, and their son Luca arrived in February 1970. They divorced in 1982. Everything between those dates, she kept to herself.
Keogh told People that Hepburn stayed in both marriages well past the point where others might have walked away, and that the reason went back to her own childhood. Her parents divorced when she was young. What she wanted as an adult was the steady household she never had as a girl. A home, children, quiet days.
She built something close to it in Switzerland. In the mid-1960s she and Ferrer bought an old farmhouse in Tolochenaz, a village near Lausanne, and named it La Paisible, French for the peaceful one. She gardened. She raised her boys. She kept dogs. For nearly thirty years, until the end of her life, that house was where she went to be nobody in particular.
There were romances the press never got hold of, either. Keogh has said Hepburn had a serious relationship with William Holden, her co-star in Sabrina, and that almost no one knew about it while it was happening. In an industry built on gossip, that takes some doing.
The last chapter was the kindest one. In 1980, at 51, she met Robert Wolders, a Dutch actor who had previously been married to Merle Oberon. The two never married each other. They were together for thirteen years, until her death in January 1993.
Her son Luca, put it plainly. “My mother was very much in love with the men she loved,” he said, adding that she was not always loved back in the same measure. Wolders, he said, was the one least troubled by her stardom. Men of that generation, Luca noted, had a hard time standing slightly to the side.
Wolders was beside her for the work that mattered most to her at the end. In 1988 Hepburn began traveling for UNICEF, starting with a trip to Ethiopia that April, and she spent her final years visiting some of the poorest places on earth on the organization’s behalf. In December 1992 she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for that work. She died of appendix cancer the following month at La Paisible, at 63.
It is a quality many of us admired in her even then, whether we could name it or not. In an era when Hollywood fed on personal stories, Audrey Hepburn kept hers close.
Some stars leave behind a clear record. Hepburn left behind an elegant mystery. And somehow, that feels exactly right for her.
