Why did Audrey Hepburn quit Hollywood?
There aren’t many stars who quit Hollywood at the peak of their fame. Daniel Day-Lewis retired shortly before earning his sixth Oscar nomination in 2018, but he’d already been working for more than three decades. Greta Garbo is the most prominent example of a star who left their career behind at what seemed like a premature time. She retired from acting in 1948 at the age of 36, having been in movies for little more than 15 years.
Audrey Hepburn’s departure from Hollywood wasn’t as dramatic as Garbo’s. She wasn’t reclusive, and she did return several times to the big screen, but her decision to leave in 1967 still seems surprising. She got her big break in Billy Wilder’s 1953 romance Roman Holiday, which earned her an Academy Award and instant stardom. She followed it up with more than a decade of classic movies, including Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Charade. In that time, she earned four more Oscar nods and three Baftas, and was one of the most beloved figures in Hollywood.
Shortly after the release of the thriller Wait Until Dark, however, Hepburn moved to Europe full-time. She had already purchased a remote estate in Switzerland, but in 1967, after splitting from the actor Mel Ferrer, she made a permanent move overseas. It had been a tumultuous 14-year marriage that included two miscarriages, a son, and allegations from some of Hepburn’s friends that Ferrer was controlling. Leaving everything behind to start a peaceful life in a small Swiss village must have been enticing.
Hepburn married her second husband, Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, in 1969, which solidified her ties to Europe and her desire to focus on raising her family. Throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s, she returned to the big screen only five times, first in the 1976 movie Robin and Marian, in which she starred with Sean Connery as older versions of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. By the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, Hepburn began devoting more time to charity work, particularly with UNICEF, and spent much of the rest of her life travelling around the world as an ambassador for the organisation.
What was her last movie?
Hepburn’s final big screen appearance came in 1989 in Steven Spielberg’s romance Always. Based on the 1943 wartime drama A Guy Named Joe, it follows Richard Dreyfuss, an aerial firefighter who dies in a plane crash while fighting a wildfire and comes back to Earth as an angel to check in on his grieving partner (Holly Hunter). Hepburn plays Hap, the angel who offers him guidance along the way.
Ironically, given Hepburn’s role in Robin and Marian, the part was originally written for Sean Connery, but when he turned it down, Spielberg had a change of heart and decided that the part would be better suited to a woman. He had very little hope that Hepburn would accept his offer. She had been largely absent from the screen for more than two decades and it was a small part. But to his surprise, she accepted.
By Hepburn’s own admission, it was a wonderful experience. She donated most of her million-plus-dollar paycheque to UNICEF and thoroughly enjoyed the shooting process. She even said that she would love to do another project with Spielberg at any time. His next film was Hook, so it was probably for the best that she didn’t take part.
Hepburn appeared in several other entertainment projects after Always and before her death in 1993. Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn was a PBS documentary series in which the actor visited seven countries around the world. She earned a posthumous Emmy for her work on the programme. The other project was a spoken-word album for children called Audrey Hepburn’s Enchanted Tales, which earned her a posthumous Grammy Award, which made her one of the few people in the world to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.
