![]() ![]() And she spent years traveling the world as a high-profile spokeswoman for the United Nations Children’s Emergency Fund. The daughter of aristocrats-turned-Fascist sympathizers, she joined the resistance in World War II Belgium. Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon is at the National Portrait Gallery from 2 July to 18 October 2015.Audrey Hepburn, who would have turned 85 Sunday, was not only one of Hollywood’s revered and beautiful actresses, but a real-life heroine.But the collective effect is to leave you wanting to see what the camera couldn’t see. Many helped to change the language of fashion photography. There are some supremely beautiful photographs in this exhibition. Her later interest in humanitarian work – she travelled to 20 countries with Unicef in the last five years of her life – is documented in the final room, but her role as a parent, which she took on full-time for long spells, goes unrecorded. For a long period in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she made no films at all. ![]() The exhibition focuses on her movie career, but somewhere here – between the images of her on the set of The Nun’s Story (1959) and on the set of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) – Hepburn became a mother. Privacy is always somewhere out of the frame. She has achieved in herself her ultimate portrait.” Even when Hepburn is staring squarely at the camera, there is the suggestion of secrecy, a thought withheld. “I am, and forever will be, devastated by the gift of Audrey Hepburn before my camera,” Richard Avedon once said, having worked with her on countless shoots. The exhibition invites the question of how far Hepburn herself was in control of her image – but it does not muster a satisfying reply. That seems pertinent, because if you try to plot a narrative of her development across these rooms, at every step the familiar features of her image intercept the sense of change or growth. In fashion magazines today, where Hepburn continues to inspire editorials, the epithet most often associated with her is “timeless”. Hepburn in Ethiopia on her first field mission as goodwill ambassador to UNICEF in 1988. What is startling, looking around the opening room, even at these impromptu images by unrecorded photographers, is how comprehensively Hepburn occupied a stylised image of herself at such a young age. ![]() That photograph, according to her youngest son, Luca Dotti, was one of the few images of herself that Hepburn displayed at home. By the time she was snapped in the foyer of a Monte Carlo hotel in 1951, resting her head tenderly on the shoulder of the writer Colette, she was on the brink of her big break – starring in the Broadway adaptation of the novelist’s Gigi. Her eyebrows were thickening, the cropped hair sharpening. Such was Hepburn’s lack of presumption that when Beauchamp asked to photograph her, she declined, explaining that she couldn’t afford it.īy then, Hepburn was on her way. It was while dancing, in revue performances at venues just around the corner from the National Portrait Gallery, that Hepburn was spotted by the photographer Antony Beauchamp, whose stilted, stately fashion shots of her from 1949 later appeared in British Vogue. These were the days when Hepburn hoped for a career as a dancer, to which a pair of cracked leather ballet shoes bear witness. (The malnutrition she endured as a result of this is usually cited by her sons to explain her supreme thinness: in adulthood, she was said to sport a 22-inch waist.) The image opens the show, and the room, devoted to Hepburn’s childhood and early work, contains many quiet thrills. The image was taken in 1938, shortly before the war and impending Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, where Hepburn was to spend years of her youth. The photograph, among 35 loaned from the private collection of Hepburn’s sons, is one of the gems of this exhibition, the first organised by a British gallery with the support of the Audrey Hepburn Estate. ![]()
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