Fairy Hepburn

Arguably the most recognizable UNICEF photo of Audrey was captured by John Isaac in Ethiopia. She even based a drawing on it for a charity auction. The drawing is much more somber in comparison. 

Nobody ever looked like her before World War II; it is doubtful if anybody ever did, unless it be those wild children of the French Revolution whose stride in the foreground of romantic canvases. Audrey Hepburn has enormous heron’s eyes and dark eye-brows slanted towards the Far East. Her facial features show character rather than prettiness: the bridge of the nose seems almost too narrow to carry its length, which bares into a globular tip with nostrils startlingly like a duck’s bill. Her mouth is wide, with a cleft under the lower lip too deep for classical beauty, and the delicate chin appears even smaller by contrast with the exaggerated width of her jaw bones. Seen at the full, the outline of her face is perhaps too square; yet she intuitively tilts her head with a restless and perky asymmetry. She is like a portrait by Modigliani where the various distortions are not only interesting in themselves but make a completely satisfying composite. Like the natural artist that she is Audrey Hepburn is bold and sure in her effects. There is no lack of vigor in her rejection of the softly pretty. She is a wistful child of a war-chided era, and the shadow thrown across her youth underlines even more its precious evanescence. But if she can reflect sorrow, she seems also to enjoy the happiness life provides for her with such bounty. It is a rare phenomenon to find a very young girl with such inherent “star quality.” As a result of her enormous success, Audrey Hepburn has already acquired the extra incandescent glow which comes as a result of being acclaimed, admired, and loved. Yet while developing her radiance, she has too much innate candor to take on that gloss of artificiality Hollywood is apt to demand of its queens.

Audrey Hepburn by Cecil Beaton, 1954. The full article with accompanying images can be read here.

"Famed for her graceful poise, my mother Audrey Hepburn always held her head and neck in a certain way - not just in her movies but even on long car journeys. She never told me why - and, like most people, I assumed it was because she'd been trained as a dancer. In fact, it was a grim legacy of the Second World War. Towards the end of the war, she'd ventured out into the garden of her home near Arnhem in the Netherlands, desperate to soak up some sun. She was pale as a ghost from malnutrition and months trapped indoors. She'd almost dropped off to sleep when the ground shuddered beneath her as a shell landed nearby. Expecting to be 'blown to oblivion.' she dug frantically into the earth as gravel peppered her skin like buckshot and fragments of metal whizzed past. What she never told anyone until a few years before her death was that a small piece of shrapnel embedded itself in her neck. 'It left me so I can't bend my neck in the ways other people can,' she confided to a friend. 'Promise not to tell anyone as long as I'm alive!'"