The making of an icon: Audrey Hepburn’s traumatic childhood
One of the most iconic stars in Hollywood history, Audrey Hepburn came from less than humble beginnings to conquer the movie business, but she endured her fair share of trauma and hardship along the way.
The daughter of a Dutch noblewoman and a Bohemia-born British father, her earliest years were overshadowed by the advent of World War II. Hepburn’s parents have a rather unsavoury history of embracing the fascism running rampant throughout Europe at the time, but that was just one of the many issues she was forced to contend with during her earliest years.
Her parents ultimately divorced when she was only six years old, which had a profound impact on Hepburn. Being raised at the height of a global conflict was hardly ideal under any circumstances, and while maturing under the shadow of war was a formative experience that shaped her into the determined individual she would become, her father’s absence was keenly felt.
Initially, her mother, Ella van Heemstra, would brush off any inquiries into her absent father’s whereabouts by saying he’d gone off on a trip from which he wasn’t expected to return, but Hepburn could see that she was hurting. Putting on a brave face in front of the kids is all well and good, but the household had pretty thin walls.
“I thought my mother was never going to stop crying,” she recalled in the documentary Audrey: More Than an Icon. “She sobbed through the night. I would hear her sobbing in the next room. I would just try and be with her. I missed him terribly from the day he disappeared.”
Reflecting on her parents’ divorce, she admitted that “it certainly stayed with me for the rest of my life”. Due to her father abruptly abandoning his family without explanation, the star confessed it had “left me insecure, for life perhaps.” She went on to achieve great things, but that void in her life was one that she struggled to fill even when she became accustomed to success.
“As a child, you can’t quite understand,” Hepburn elaborated. “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 left a very deep mark on me.”
Even when she was a global superstar, Hepburn continued to long for her father, tracking him down for a reunion in 1964. By that point, she was a household name with an Academy Award, a Tony, two Baftas, and a pair of Golden Globes under her belt, only to be left devastated by her old man’s complete and utter indifference.
Photographer John Isaac—who was present for the meeting—revealed that “he did not receive her” during their long-awaited reuniting, which “really hurt” Hepburn. Fame and fortune often have a way of mending broken fences, but in this case, it simply wasn’t to be.
