In Intimate Audrey—a new biography of Audrey Hepburn, out now from Grand Central Publishing—there are images that feel immediately familiar. Audrey with the French writer Colette, whose novella Gigi gave Hepburn her first role on Broadway; Audrey in the garden at La Paisible, her home in Switzerland; Audrey greeting director William Wyler as Gary Cooper looks on during the filming of Love in the Afternoon. They are the images that have etched her into our collectsive memory as a poised, luminous, fully formed star.
But what lingers—what will stop even the most devoted Hepburn admirer mid-page—are the book’s childhood mementos. A photograph taken shortly after Hepburn’s birth in Brussels. The snapshot of a small girl standing alone, absorbed in a book. And, most unexpectedly, a series of delicate drawings: dresses rendered in careful strokes, Christmas scenes imagined in soft washes of color, children gathered in quiet anticipation. They are not the work of a future icon, but of a child—one whose life, as her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer makes clear, was as much shaped by absence and austerity as by her own imagination.
Intimate Audrey, written with Wendy Holden—a former war correspondent (and no relation to William Holden)—is Ferrer’s second book about his mother, following 1999’s Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit. But where that first work was, as he describes it, “an emotional…a spiritual biography,” this new volume aims to be something more definitive.
“Every year people would say, ‘When are you going to have the ultimate, the authorized, the real biography about Audrey Hepburn?’” he tells me. “And finally, I thought, if I’m going to do this—because, you know, like the Hippocratic Oath, you don’t treat your own family members—I needed someone to be a filter, to be the liver of this book.”
The structure quickly came into focus, beginning with the Second World War and concluding with Hepburn’s work as a UNICEF ambassador. “We sat down and we started creating a spine—a skeleton of the book,” he says. “And you realize very quickly that everybody knows the films, and there’s not much to tell there. She was a professional, she was nice to the crew, she showed up on time, she didn’t make scenes.” What interested him instead were the quieter, more difficult truths. “Through the little things, you get to realize who the person was,” he notes. “Because she’s becoming—or has become—such a legend, she’s sort of floating away like a balloon at a birthday party, and I wanted to bring her back and ground her again.”
Those “little things” are not always gentle. Hepburn’s father left when she was six years old—walking out of her life without warning—which she would later describe as the most traumatic event of her childhood. She cried for days, and the loss would remain with her well into adulthood. It is this kind of detail—intimate, destabilizing, and deeply human—that Ferrer returns to again and again, not to diminish the myth, but to contextualize it.
The drawings included in the book, many of which survived the war tucked into family albums, offer a glimpse into her interior world. One, dated 1944, shows children watching a puppet show—an image of innocence produced in the midst of wartime. Another depicts a Christmas tree, lit and adorned, at a time when such abundance would have been out of reach. “They really had nothing during the war,” Sean says. “So it’s sort of a child’s hope of what the world will be like when things go back to normal—the expectation, the dream.”
That tension—between austerity and imagination, between hunger and beauty—would come to define Hepburn’s adult life as well. “I wanted to say to people, she’s a real story, she’s a real person,” Ferrer says. “She had to struggle—and yet she became this extraordinary symbol, and still remained a lovely, decent, humble person.”
With the book, Ferrer seeks to offer a kind of guided album: part memory, part interpretation, part quiet act of preservation. What follows are some of the images—and the stories—that struck him most.
“This is right after her birth in Brussels, so her parents are still together. She looks about 10 or 12 weeks—probably the summer of 1929. They must have propped her up on a pillow when she first got home. Someone had a camera, or they got someone to take a picture.”
“This is her holding a book. I would guess she’s either going or coming from school in Belgium, based on her passport pictures and the picture of her on the bench with the French writing. This is still before she went to the UK and before she came back to Holland for the war.”
“She was six when her father left. They were still in Belgium, so this must have been before that—before he walked out…This would have been the house outside of Brussels—the house where they lived. They lived first where she was born, and then they moved to this part of Brussels that’s a little greener, slightly outside of town.”
“These are wonderful illustrations she made—sort of pretty dresses. I think it’s inspired by Christmas, because there’s a Christmas tree and mistletoe. She always had an ease. She never sat down and became an artist, but she had the hand… and my daughter has inherited that now. And later, when she was working on films, there were wonderful sketches of her costumes with little material samples—what the dress would look like.”
“They really had nothing during the war, so it’s a child’s hope of what the world will be like when things go back to normal—the expectation. We were not an American family, so Thanksgiving was not a thing. We always came together as a family for Christmas… we would all gather for 10 days or two weeks, from right before Christmas until after New Year’s. That was a time to be together and sort of download what everybody had been doing.
“She was a wonderful cook. She prepared wonderful desserts—pavlova, things she loved to make, her French chocolate cake. And, you know, you eat fish at Christmas in the European system, so Christmas dinner would be wild salmon or roasted fish with baby potatoes, tartar sauce, cucumber salad—those kinds of things.”
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