Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels in 1929, to a Dutch aristocratic mother and an English-born father. Her childhood tasted loss early when her father left home, and it was then utterly rewritten by war — in Nazi-occupied Holland she survived famine by eating tulip bulbs and witnessed relatives being persecuted. Those adolescent years spent in fear and want both wore down her body and planted in her heart a lifelong sensitivity to suffering and to the vulnerable.

After the war she carried her ballet dream to London, only to be told that her height and undernourishment made becoming a top dancer unlikely, and she had to turn to musical revues and small parts to make a living. The turn of fate was almost accidental: on a location shoot she was singled out at a glance by the writer Colette, who handpicked her to star in the Broadway play "Gigi." Success on the stage pushed her to Hollywood's door, and that frail girl who had emerged from the fires of war was about to become the face of an era.

"Roman Holiday" in 1953 made her famous overnight, and with it — her first Hollywood starring role — she won the Academy Award for Best Actress. The dozen-plus years that followed were her golden screen era: the little black dress in "Breakfast at Tiffany's," the flower girl in "My Fair Lady" — one image after another became eternal symbols of popular culture. Her collaboration with designer Givenchy went further, redefining elegance itself — not a piling-up of opulence, but restraint, purity, and an inner certainty.

Amid her great fame, she always held family dear. Two marriages, a fading from the film world, a return to life — she did not cling to the spotlight, coming back only occasionally and giving most of her time to her children and to herself. This detachment from fame and fortune set her apart from many stars of her generation: she was an idol chosen by her age, yet she never handed herself over to that age's clamour.

In her later years she made her most important choice. From 1988 she served as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, turning the hunger and war of her childhood memories into action, travelling to the hardest corners such as Ethiopia, Somalia, and Bangladesh, often at her own expense, to raise funds and speak up for children. This work continued to the end of her life; after returning she was diagnosed with a rare cancer, and in 1993 she died peacefully at her home in Switzerland.

People remember her for far more than that face and those films. She proved that elegance can be a kind of strength, and that beauty can point toward others rather than oneself. From a child of wartime to a screen legend, and then to a humanitarian who travelled for the weak, Audrey Hepburn lived her whole life as the phrase she loved most — that when you reach out a helping hand, you find it at the end of your own arm.