TIMELINE
The Timeline features each decade documenting Audrey’s life and career and also includes her diary from film premieres, award ceremonies, scheduled interviews, and personal milestones.
TIMELINE
1929
May
4th – Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born 3am on Rue Keyenveld 48, 1050 Ixelles, Belgium. Daughter of Joseph Victor Ruston and Ella van Heemstra. Her father was not present at birth due to a business trip. Ella’s parents had sent a trusted midwife from Holland to tend for the delivery.“Like most newborn babies, Audrey was small, wrinkled, and monkey-faced. But she quickly grew out of it and bewitched us all with her ravishing dancing eyes."
- Ian Quarles van Ufford, her brother
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
25th – At twenty-one days old, she contracted whooping cough that made her heart stop beating. Ella revives her by spanking.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
July
© Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
Audrey at 3 months old.
Source: Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, 2003, Atria Books.
Entry of Birth
18th – Audrey's birth certificate registered in Britain.
Source: Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, 2003, Atria Books.
TIMELINE
1930
© Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
In Belgium, Audrey in a pram with her nurse, Greta Hanley.
Source: Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, 2003, Atria Books.
TIMELINE
1931
During this time, Audrey and her family lived in Brussels, Belgium.
TIMELINE
1932
January
Baroness Ella van Heemstra prefers the countryside over the bustling city life of Brussels, especially for a family of five: herself, her husband, two sons, and one daughter. She rents a small house known as “Castel Sainte-Cecile” in a woody village of Linkebeek.The old Ruston house had gardens and fruit orchards—its quaint charm resembled Audrey's own La Paisible estate.
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
TIMELINE
1933
With the encouragement of her aunts, at age four, Audrey started taking piano lessons and eventually used her talents to perform at birthday parties and family gatherings.She demonstrated her piano skills in the opening scene of 1987 film Love Among Thieves.
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
Audrey frequently visits her maternal grandparents in Holland and takes trips to London and Paris with her father for his business.
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
TIMELINE
1934
Joseph had to be away from home due to work, which arose many arguments between him and his wife, Ella.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
September
© Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
30th – At five years old with her father Joseph.
Source: Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, 2003, Atria Books.
TIMELINE
1935
April
26th – Ella endorses Mosley in the April 26th, 1935 edition of BUF's weekly paper, The Blackshirt, where she writes: "We who follow Sir Oswald Mosley know that in him we have found a leader whose eyes are not riveted on earthly things, whose inspiration is of a higher plane, and whose idealism will carry Britain along to the bright light of the new dawn of spiritual rebirth."
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
May
Joseph walked out on his wife, Ella van Heemstra, and his daughter, Audrey Hepburn, who was six years old.“The most traumatic event in my life was when my father left my mother, I remember my mother's reaction. She cried day in, day out. I thought that she never would stop. You look into your mother's face, and it's covered with tears, and you're terrified. You say to yourself, 'What's going to happen to me?' The ground has gone out from under you. I'm not afraid to say something of that feeling has stayed with me through my own relationships. When 1 fell in love and married, I lived in constant fear of being left. I learned that you can't love without the fear of losing."
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group; Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
Audrey and her mother were living in Arnhem.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1936
Ella van Heemstra met an Englishman, her lover at the time, who had a country residence not far from Elham. They moved to Kent, where Audrey attended a private school in Elham, a village between Folkestone and Canterbury.With the advice of her lover, Ella and her daughter met a coal merchant named Mr. Butcher and his wife and moved into their charming cottage called Orchard Villa.Ella would travel around London to see her lover and sometimes visit her father's estate at Rosendaal while the Butchers cared for "Little Audrey" as she attended school.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
“I was terrified about being away from home. It turned out to be a good lesson in independence.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
Audrey took lessons from the Misses Rigden, two spinster sisters who ran a school in the tiny village square for about fourteen local children, aged from five to thirteen.
Source: Robert Matzen, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, April 15, 2019, GoodKnight Books; Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Among her classmates is Joan Hawkins who remembered her well:"She called herself Audrey Ruston then, but one day she confided in me, 'My name’s not just Ruston. It’s also Hepburn, too … like Katharine Hepburn, the film star.'"
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1937
© The Sampson Family Collection.
At eight, Audrey joined the Brownie troop known as the "Elham Brownie Pack" and played as one of the king’s men in the production of Humpty Dumpty.
Source: Robert Matzen, Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, April 15, 2019, GoodKnight Books; Ruth Cassidy, Audrey Hepburn found in wartime register during Kent village stay near Canterbury, January 19th, 2024, Kent Online.
TIMELINE
1938
May
4th – “Her mother invited everyone to her ninth birthday party, in May 1938, which was held in the corrugated iron village hall. What I chiefly remember is a tape that the mother stretched along the wall, to which were pinned little gifts; and the baroness led us up, one by one and blindfolded, to grope for our present … but I always felt she steered each child toward the gift she wanted him or her to have. She was quite manipulative that way. Later, we all went back to Orchard Villa and I think it was the baroness who took our group photo with Audrey. A very sharp, clear snapshot for those days, possibly with a German Leica. So far as I could judge, the family hadn’t much money, or took care the way they spent it. The baroness bought Audrey my old red bike, second-hand, out of the cycle shop.”
- Joan Hawkins, childhood friend
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
© Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
8th – Audrey with her dolls in the garden of Orchard Villa, Elham.
Source: Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit, 2003, Atria Books.
© Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Luca Dotti.
Audrey is nine years old and lives in Elham, in Kent, at a boarding school run by the Rigden sisters. She spends her summers with a miners family and the caption, in her own handwriting, tells it all: Elham, with the Butchers where I spent all my summers and adored it.© Text and Image by the Audrey Hepburn Estate.
September
8th – Audrey wrote a verse in Joan Hawkin’s autograph book:It is dated 8 September 1938, and reads:‘If you have a Friend / Then keep her / Let not that friend your secrets know / For if that friend becomes your foe / Then all the world your secrets know.’
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1939
June
24th – The final papers in the divorce proceedings passed through a court in The Hague, and her parents, Ella van Heemstra and Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, officially divorced. Ella received full custody of Audrey.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group; Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
September
1st – Germany invaded Poland.
3rd – England declares war on Germany.
Ella and her sons, Andrew and Ian, visits relatives in Arnhem.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
© National Archives.
29th – The document is a list of every person living in England and Wales on 29 September 1939. "Audrey K" is found in the 1939 Register records; like her father, Joseph, she uses the double-barreled name "Hepburn-Ruston." She is noted to be "F" for female, and her status is "at school."
Source: Find My Past; Ruth Cassidy, Audrey Hepburn found in wartime register during Kent village stay near Canterbury, January 19th, 2024, Kent Online.
At 10, Audrey had abruptly left Elham; at that time, her mother was in the Netherlands. Her childhood friend, Joan, recalled seeing Audrey with a small travel bag and wearing a white beret and, finally, getting into a local taxi:“It went down the street, past the coal merchant’s lorry, and turned out of sight, going in the direction of Folkestone and, I supposed, the train for London. And that was the last I ever saw of Audrey Hepburn.”
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Ella arrange Audrey to board a train from Kent to London to meet her father. They meet at Waterloo Station; she described it like the scene from E. Nesbit’s The Railroad Children. This is the last time she sees her father as a young child.“My mother, who was in Holland with the boys, was anxious to get me out of England and back to Holland, because Holland was neutral. There was still a few Dutch planes that were allowed to fly. Somehow my mother had contacted my father and asked him to meet me at the train in London. They put me on this bright orange plane. You know, orange is the national color, and it flew very low. That was the last time I saw my father."
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Ian Woodward, 1984, Audrey Hepburn, St Martins Press; Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
December
Ella and her sons board a flight to the Netherlands, and stay at the van Heemstra home in Villa Beukenhof, a village in Velp.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
TIMELINE
1940
April
24th – Her paternal grandmother, Frau Anna von Foregger (as she had become through her second marriage), corresponded with the child and sent her presents, usually clothes; and Audrey replied, sometimes with a poignant footnote expressing how much she missed her father. ‘Dearest Grandmother,’ she wrote on 24 April 1940, telling the far-off old lady how spotless the house was now that she and her mother had finished the spring-cleaning, and adding that she had got a pitch-black dog she was calling Pluto. In a PS, whose very brevity has the concentrated ache of the lonely child, she asks: ‘Have you heard anything from Papa?’
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
May
9th – Audrey fell in love with ballet after seeing a performance from the prestigious Sadler’s Wells; that very night, she was determined to be a ballerina.
In May 1940 the Sadler’s Wells ballet company arrived as part of a morale-boosting tour of the Netherlands. They were led by Ninette de Valois; Margot Fonteyn and Robert Helpmann were the principal dancers. In an atmosphere of mounting apprehension they performed the ballet Façade. Audrey was chosen by the Arnhem Conservatory to present bouquets to de Valois and Fonteyn, who was her particular favourite. She had seen Fonteyn dance on one of her pre-war visits to London, and had gone backstage afterwards and talked to the charming and welcoming young woman in her dressing room.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin; Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
10th – Germany invaded the Netherlands.
14th – The Dutch forces surrendered.
17th – Germany completely took over the Netherlands."The second worst memory I have after my father’s disappearance, it was my mother coming into my bedroom one morning, pulling back the curtains and saying 'Wake up, the war’s on.'"
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
23rd – Fear of a ‘Fifth Column’ of Nazi sympathizers, and perhaps saboteurs, among the population led the British Parliament to pass a series of emergency defence regulations even before the outbreak of war. These gave the government powers of summary arrest and detention without trial for an indefinite period. The culmination of these measures, Regulation 18b, as it was known, was passed on 23 May 1940 as a secret law expressly directed against the British Union of Fascists.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
There was a strong anti-English sentiment among the German occupiers. Recognizing the true danger of Audrey's name and British nationality, her mother, Ella, registers her as Edda van Heemstra and cautions her daughter not to speak English in public.
Source: Donald Spoto, Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn, October 9, 2007, Crown.
July
This, then, was the political pogrom – no other word is more apt for the swiftness, inhumanity and frequently blundering inefficiency with which the police and M15, the secret services, acted – in which Hepburn-Ruston now found himself caught up. He was arrested, some time after July 1940, and charged at first with membership of the British Union of Fascists. However, his name still did not appear on the official membership list. The charge was changed to one of ‘hostile association’. This was much more serious. It implied that the person named – on the charge sheet he was referred to as ‘John [sic; not Joseph] Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston’, an error typical of those made by Regulation 18b’s harassed officials
Hepburn-Ruston was first held in Brixton Prison, then, according to one eyewitness, transferred at the time of the early air raids on London to the concentration camp that had been built on Ascot racecourse, complete with barbed wire, watchtowers and machine guns. When this holding pen became overcrowded he was moved north to Liverpool, to endure the Dickensian conditions of Walton gaol.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1941
Audrey’s serious ballet training began at age twelve, in 1941, under Winja Marova at the Arnhem School of Music. Billed as “the former Russian ballerina,” Marova was in fact a good Dutch lady named Winnie Koopman, who was married to the school’s director, Douwe Draaisma, and had romanticized her professional name.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
At 12, Audrey performs at the ballet recitals in front of German officers at Arnhem's Wehrmachtheim. She dropped three years later in to aid the resistance.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
Summer
Hepburn-Ruston’s hope of early release gradually drained away – Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, turned down his appeal in the summer of 1941 on the grounds that habeas corpus, which protects citizens against imprisonment without charge or trial, had been superseded by Regulation 18b.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1942
April
Photographer unknown.
14th – Audrey Hepburn at the age of 12 (would be 13 years old next month) in one of her very first professional photo shoots.
July
15th – German authorities begin deporting Jewish people from the Netherlands to concentrating centers and killing centers to Germany and German-occupied Poland.
“I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on the train, I was a child observing a child… Then I realized what would have happened to him.”
- Audrey Hepburn, 1991
August
15th – Audrey's beloved uncle, Count Otto van Limburg Stirum, is executed with other hostages from different sections of Holland. He was the husband of Ella's sister, Miesje.“We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they’d close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read Anne’s diary, I’ve marked one place where she says, “Five hostages shot today.” That was the day my uncle was shot. And in this child’s words I was reading about what was inside me and is still there.“
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group; Ian Woodward, 1984, Audrey Hepburn, St Martins Press.
TIMELINE
1943
March
12th – She wrote to her grandmother on 12 March 1943 (noting on the envelope, for the convenience of the wartime censors, that it was written ‘in Engels’) thanking her for the presents of a ‘sweet little blouse. Having quite a lot of brown clothes, I can wear it often’ and a hat and muff, and added that she was leading a very busy life: no fewer than three dance evenings with overflow audiences in the town theatre. She had had her first crisis when, just a few days before the last rehearsal, one of the four dancers, who included Audrey and the ballet teacher, had telephoned to say that she could not possibly dance on the evening.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Summer
Short draft. Audrey visiting her distant relatives.
Source: John Schwartz, Audrey: A Cherished Memory, November 4, 2017, Sun Hill Books.
Blackout performances - The little soirees fell into a category known as "black," with all the window coverings drawn to keep the Moffen from peering in. Because of wartime shortages, Audrey's ballet slippers were now well patched, her costumes made from materials in her mother's rag bin.Her performing talents were also put to use for the cause and, equally, for herself. In 1943, the Germans confiscated all radios. Thenceforth, in more ways than one, a girl had to make her own music. “I was left to my own devices,” she said, and those devices drew her more deeply into music and dance, “where one didn’t have to talk, only listen.62 There was a war, but your dreams for yourself go on [and] I wanted to be a dancer.”Her personal ambition linked up with the Resistance in a series of “blackout performances” that served both as an outlet for the dancers and a fund-raising activity for the underground: “We would literally do it in somebody’s house with locked windows, drawn blinds. I had a friend who played the piano and my mother would run up costumes out of old curtains and things. I’d do my own choreography—not to be believed!”63"We danced to scratchy old recordings of highlights from Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Giselle, which has always been my favorite among the classical ballets," Audrey remembered. "Alas, I always had to be the boy in a pas de deux because I was too tall to play the girl."
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group; Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
TIMELINE
1944
January
8th – The biggest dance moment of Audrey’s young life came on January 8, 1944, in a student showcase choreographed by Winja Marova at Arnhem’s City Theatre. “Audrey Hepburn-Ruston,” as the program billed her, featured in many numbers, from Burgmüller’s March Militaire to Debussy’s Danseuse de Delphus, returning late in the show for her tour de force—the “Morgenstimmung” (Morning Mood) and “Death of Aase” sections of Grieg’s Peer Gynt.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
May
4th – Audrey's fifteenth birthday celebration in May 1944 was her first without a cake. Her mother couldn't get any of the ingredients needed to bake one, so she improvised by filling a bowl with wild strawberries and sticking a candle in the middle. Sugar had been scarcer than gold since 1940, but the dessert still made a fairly sweet ending to Audrey's spartan birthday dinner, which started with leaves of endive for an appetizer, followed by some watered-down vegetable soup and a quarter-loat of ersatz bread made from dried pea flour.
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
Winter
“During the war our times were very hard, particularly in the winter of 1944. Half our house was blown away, and we lived in the cellar on mattresses. I was there with my mother, my aunt, and my grandfather. A friend of my mother’s had been out shopping, and we took her in to get her out of the firing, and even a total stranger who happened to be on the street spent two days with us. That cellar became a sort of shelter.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Marilyn Murray Willison, Audrey Hepburn – THE DEVINE MISS HEPBURN, Marie Claire.
TIMELINE
1945
March
Audrey and other young women were stopped by German soldiers with machine guns; they were instructed to march in herds to the German headquarters to work in their kitchen. Distracted when looking for more women, Audrey made an escape, and luckily, she got home.“I was picked right off the streets with a dozen others, as they turned to get more women, I nipped off and ran, and stayed indoors for the next month.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
April
Hepburn-Ruston was kept in internment until April 1945, an exceptionally long period, testifying to the extreme opinions he held or to the serious view taken of his actions during the time he had ‘fronted’ the Nazi-backed propaganda agency. He was one of thirty-nine in the last but one batch of detainees, all with strong pro-Nazi sympathies, to be released only a month before the war officially ended.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
May
5th – The Germans surrender at Lüneburg Heath, leading to the liberation of the whole country and the end of Nazi occupation. This mark the end of World War II in the Netherlands."We whooped and hollered and danced for joy. I wanted to kiss every one of them. The incredible relief of being free it's something that's very hard to verbalize. Freedom is more like something in the air. For me, it was hearing soldiers speaking English instead of German, and smelling real tobacco smoke again from their cigarettes."
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Wikipedia.
8th – From Amsterdam, Audrey wrote to her grandmother on 8 May 1945 to say she had now started at a Russian dancing school in the city and thought it much better run than her old school in Arnhem. Her teacher, Sonia Gaskell, a Russian emigrée, was ‘charming’.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Audrey and her mother, Ella, reunite with Alexander—who was underground hiding—and his pregnant wife, Maria.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
Still in Amsterdam, Audrey was in critical condition due to a crippling illness that required her to stay in a hospital; her mother lives with her relatives in a small apartment.Ella reached out to an old flame who became a dear friend, Michael "Mickey" Burn, an Englishman she had known since the pre-war days, for help.“Ella wrote to me in desperation, saying she needed the new wonder drug, penicillin, but it was next to impossible to come by in the Netherlands except for more money than she was able to spare at that time. Could I send her some cartons of cigarettes? – which then fetched a staggeringly high price on the black market. I sent hundreds and hundreds, thousands of cigarettes,” said Burn.She sold the cigarettes on the black market and used the money to buy penicillin, which saved Audrey’s life.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
After Audrey’s health improved, she and her mother would go to the liberation parties in Arnhem.“Audrey’s mother rather enjoyed the fun with the English officers. So did Audrey. I remember there was a club in the woods called the Brass Hat and we were invited to go to the dances. Audrey was asked, too. Ella allowed her to go and I chaperoned her,” says Pauline Everts, a friend of Ella’s.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Summer
Summer of 1945 – Volunteered for work in the Royal Military Invalids Home, where Audrey nurses and assists wounded soldiers and retired veterans in a white house built in 1862 by King Willem III in Arnhem. Nearby is a young Terence Young, the film director of Wait Until Dark:“While she was being shelled in Arnhem, I was in a tank a few miles away. We were stuck on that single road into the town and never able to come to the relief of the unfortunate parachutists stuck there.”
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
July
17th – Audrey became an aunt with the birth of Alexander and Maria’s son, Michael.Soon after, Audrey’s other brother, Ian, showed up at the door—walking almost 325 miles from Berlin to Arnhem. Ian was able to find his home when he identified Audrey's makeup box in her bedroom window.“We had almost given up, when the doorbell rang and it was Ian... We lost everything, of course—our houses, our possessions, our money. But we didn’t give a hoot. We got through with our lives, which was all that mattered.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group; Robert Matzen, Ian Quarles van Ufford Audrey Hepburn, April 2021.
TIMELINE
1946
May
Her mother, Ella, bought a season ticket to the Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra for Audrey’s seventeenth birthday.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
Audrey was chosen to dance with Gaskell’s top student star, Beatrix Leoni, in a matinee performance at Amsterdam’s Hortus Theater. “She didn’t have a lot of great technique,” wrote the Algemeen Handelsblad newspaper critic of her three solos, “but she definitely had talent.”
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
Audrey’s dancing lessons were brought to an end when the school’s municipal subsidy was drastically cut and Sonia Gaskell decided to move to Paris. The baroness refused to follow, feeling that she would be unable to support her family as well in a city and country where she was a total stranger. Perhaps she had already decided to take advantage of her British citizenship, acquired through marriage, by taking Audrey to London and continuing her tuition there. This decision was taken at the end of 1946.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
December
Audrey received tickets to a series of Beethoven spring quartets for Christmas from her mother, Ella. She was so limited in funds that she walked from her apartment to the Concertgebouw instead of taking a trolley.
Source: Barry Paris, Audrey Hepburn, 1996, Penguin Publishing Group.
TIMELINE
1947
January
4th – Audrey wrote to her grandmother on 4 January 1947 and expressed the delight she felt at a recent visit she had paid to England. She told her that she and her mother hoped to go and live there ‘soon’. Her eagerness to make dancing her career had been whetted by the two ballets she had seen at Covent Garden.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Audrey and her mother arriving in Britain in 1947 with a suitcase apiece and only £35 between them omits most of the real story. In fact, the two of them did not arrive in England together. Audrey’s admission to the Ballet Rambert was held up by what seems to have been bureaucratic confusion over her status as a minor and her nationality. The baroness’s passport had expired: she needed to renew it. Though she could readily prove British citizenship by reference to her marriage certificate, the same document would have revealed to the British authorities the name of a man who had only recently been set at liberty after five years’ internment as a Fascist sympathizer. The upshot was that Madame Rambert vouched for Audrey, who arrived safely in London and moved into a room in her teacher’s own house. The baroness followed a month or so later, having obtained a new passport, probably Dutch, but no doubt crossing her fingers that the articles in praise of Fascism which she had imprudently contributed to Blackshirt had either been forgotten or would not compromise her. Her daughter was not the only lucky member of the family.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
TIMELINE
1948
May
7th – Dutch 7 first press screening
Source: Warren G. Harris, Audrey Hepburn: A Biography, August 1, 1994, Simon & Schuster.
November
19th – Audrey signed the Esher Standard Contract for Engagement of Chorus for the 1948 stage production of High Button Shoes, where the Manager pays £9 for every week of twelves performances.
Source: Christie's.
December
22nd – Audrey debut as a chorus girl on the opening day of High Button Shoes in Hippodrome, London. Produced by Archie Thomson. Directed by Jack Hylton. Music by Jule Styne. Choreography by Jerome Robbins. 291-performance run.
TIMELINE
1949
May
18th – Cecil Landeau’s Sauce Tartare show opened in Cambridge Theatre, London. Music by Berkeley Fase. Lyrics by Geoffrey Parsons. Choreography by Buddy Bradley. 443-performance run.
Source: The Guide to Musical Theater
The autograph book dated in 1949 contained the signatures of stars from Sauce Tartare, the husband-and-wife actor Donald Stewart and actress Renee Houston (the star of the revue), and Audrey Hepburn.
June
Photographer unknown.
28th – Audrey photographed on the roof of the Cambridge Theatre in London. She was performing as a chorus girl in the show Sauce Tartare.
“So after Sauce Tartare, at eleven thirty at night, I’d be at Ciro’s again at midnight, make up and do two shows. All dancing. I made £11 for the first show and £20 for the second. So I was doing eighteen shows weekly and earning over £150 a week. I was completely nuts.”
- Audrey Hepburn
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
© Photograph by Angus McBean.
Cecil Landeau agreed for Angus McBean to use Audrey as a model to shoot a campaign for the skincare company Lacto-Calamine, where Landeau pockets £25 and Audrey receives £4 for half a day's work. She asked the photographer for his directions:Audrey: “What shall I wear?”Agnus: “Nothing.”Audrey: “Oh, I’m not taking my clothes off.”Agnus directed her to be stuck in the sand.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
December
For the month of December, Cecil Landeau decided to have a five-week Christmas show for children called A Christmas Party. Audrey experienced what it was like to be on her last bottom dollar (in this case, pound) and became a main cast be on the show.“I got home at 2 a.m. (from Ciro’s), slept and was up and in rehearsal at 10 a.m. I was very ambitious and took every opportunity. I wanted to learn and I wanted to be seen.”
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.
Gamma-Keystone-France via Getty Images.
9th – Audrey playing a ballerina during rehearsals at the Cambridge Theater. Next to her, Gillian Moran plays Golliwog, and Cherry Adele plays a doll from Kentucky.
Source: Getty Images
“My voice was pitched so high that my mother said I sounded as though I were about to take off,” said Audrey, who did eight matinees a week until the children show’s run ended on January 1st, 1950.
Source: Alexander Walker, Audrey: Her Real Story, December 15, 1997, St. Martin's Griffin.