Audrey

I was not an actress.

When it came to movies, I was a dancer.

I didn't have any way for them to know

whether I could really act.

But they realized there was enough there for them

as a human being, to draw out.

And I'm grateful because I suppose the way I am

is what has brought me so much good fortune, you know?

From the motion picture capital of the world,

the academy of motion picture arts and sciences,

26th annual academy awards.

And now, over to you live in Los Angeles.

Should I read it?

Should I read it?

I don't think I will.

Ladies and gentlemen in New York City,

miss. Audrey Hepburn in Roman holiday.

It's too much.

I want to say thank you to everybody

who in these past months and years

have helped, guided

and given me so much.

I'm truly, truly grateful.

I'm terribly happy.

Today the name of Audrey Hepburn

flashes from theater marquees.

From the covers of national magazines,

from column upon column of newspaper rave notices.

For everybody is talking about her sensational star debut

in Paramount's Roman holiday.

Audrey Hepburn was not like any other actor

or actress out there.

She just had magnetism.

People loved her.

She was a newcomer that was so strong

and so impressive.

You became world famous over one night

after having made Roman holiday.

I think that many of the girls here

would like to be a star like you.

Have you any advice to give to them?

The only advice I can give is that,

they must make sure they want to be it enough

because as it's so often said,

hard work is never so hard when it is done with love.

Audrey's look with something brand new.

There were the girl next door types like Doris day,

and then the sex bombs like Marilyn Monroe.

There were wonderful female stars at the time,

but there was nothing quite like her.

She created this type of woman that really didn't exist.

That was her.

Audrey is an icon for people

from all over the world.

Her image, her style and the way of life.

That's her great beauty.

People love her and know her because of her lovely face

or her smile.

But there was a real Audrey that people don't know.

She's not only an icon on print.

Audrey's life was so much more than that.

There's a lovely phrase

in Arthur rubinstein's book.

Many years ago,

when he had a very, very difficult beginning to his life.

He had to decide whether to reject life or to love it.

And he said, I just decided to love it unconditionally.

And I believe that.

Audrey's parents met in the Dutch indies.

Audrey's father was a diplomat.

And Audrey's mother, the baroness at heemstra was there

because her father was a governor.

Audrey hepburn never mentioned it really,

but in her family, there was this Dutch nobility.

My grandfather, Joseph ruston hepburn

was an aspiring aristocrat.

There's a typical twenties formal portrait shot of him.

Showing him just as he was.

Always very well groomed a small moustache,

slick black hair and nice suit.

He was an aspiring aristocrat

whose background was very fuzzy.

He made up some sort of lineage that would have made him

a distant heir of the king of Scotland.

He thought highly of himself

and nothing really materialized.

When they lived in the Dutch indies,

he felt that marxists, communists were going to take over.

So they moved back to Belgium.

And that's when my mother was born in 1929.

Audrey's father quickly embraced

the Belgium fascist party, the rexist.

And he was also vehemently anti-semitic.

Audrey's parents went to Nazi Germany,

and cheered on the marches.

They were very impressed by the rejuvenation

of the German nation, under Nazi rule.

And Audrey's mother, even penned a few articles

for magazines

really praising the Nazi regime.

That was 1935,

which is exactly when Audrey's father abandoned his family

and moved to england where he became

an active member of the black shirts.

The British fascist party.

When the war broke out,

she was in a boarding school in the uk.

Not that far away from London, where her father lived.

He did have visitation rights, which he never used.

And so she was by herself, and other children

on weekends were seeing their parents

and she ended up spending her summers

with workers that her mother found.

Her mother felt that it would be safer

for her to be in the Netherlands

because they thought that england might be carpet bombed.

Her father actually took her to the airport.

This is the last time that she saw him.

So that was September of 1939.

She flew on the last plane that left the uk

and then into Amsterdam.

She changed her name, her first name.

She was adar. And not Audrey,

in order to not arouse suspicion that she might be english.

I was 10 when the war broke out.

This was in September and in may

the Germans marched in to Holland.

The first few months,

we didn't know quite what had happened.

Had we known the first six months of the war

that we were going to be occupied for five years,

we might have all shot ourselves.

We thought it'll be over next week.

Holland was one of the worst

because we were occupied by the ss.

Not by just the military.

Everybody sort of just clammed up and went underground

and you couldn't speak freely.

And you weren't allowed to listen to radios

and we grew up that way.

Knowing that we were all prisoners.

There came a moment when we had to

live in the cellar because parts of our house

kept being shot away.

We were sleeping on mattresses

and sitting there waiting for the shooting to stop.

My uncles were taken from their homes

and shot.

One brother was sent to Germany.

The other one was always hidden.

My uncles were the first hostages to be shot in Holland.

And it was actually the turning point

because from that day on

an underground was formed.

She was asked to take messages for the resistance

in her shoes.

And it was the city telegram at the time,

the safest on a bike, put a kid on the bike,

put a message in the insole of their shoes

and it's quick and nobody's gonna stop kids.

She performed for the Dutch resistance,

not just to raise monies,

but also to entertain people and get their minds off

the horrors that they were living through.

Ever since I was a little girl in Holland

I wanted to be a ballet dancer.

That was my dream.

As a child already.

Ballet, ballet, ballet is what I love most.

They would do plays and little musical operettas

and trying to stay discrete

and not bring the attention of the invading soldiers.

At the end of the performances,

nobody clapped their hands. They just smile in the dark.

Dancing was the lifeline throughout the war.

It helped to keep her from looking at where she was.

There's that sense of dance

as a way to take flight.

Dance was a way for her to escape.

I was terribly slim during the war

because little by little,

there was practically nothing to eat.

All children started to suffer

from malnutrition.

No provisions made, with no food in the shops.

And that last winter, I mean, nothing grows in the winter.

You can keep carrots and potatoes.

For just so long and some turnips

but we were running out of those.

And that was really very, very hard.

She survived the Dutch famine on bread made of tulips.

And when they liberated her,

she was living in her basement in the Netherlands

and the first unicef agents that had been assembled

to provide aid to women and children after the war,

they literally pulled her out of the famine.

She would always talk about how they arrived

and they handed her chocolate bar.

And like that was her turning point.

When we were liberated.