The Life and Homes of Audrey Hepburn Cultured Elegance

Audrey Hepburn, A Life in Homes. Audrey Hepburn moved house more than a dozen times before she turned 40, and the woman the world remembers in the long white gloves and the black sheath in front of the Tiffany window at dawn was the woman she became in only two of them. The first was a Dutch villa on a tree-lined street in the village of Velp, four miles east of Arnhem, where she lived with her grandfather between the ages of 13 and 16, danced for the resistance in a parlor with the windows blacked out, hid a British paratrooper in the cellar, and nearly died of starvation in the hunger winter of 1944. The second was an 18th century farmhouse on a country road outside the Swiss village of Tullochanas, where she lived for the last 30 years of her life, raised her sons to manhood at the kitchen table, and on the night of January 20, 1993, fell asleep in the bedroom, whose window opened toward a rose garden of 60 white bushes that Hubert de Givenchy had planted for her 60th birthday, and did not wake up. The villagers called it La Paisible, the peaceful place. The houses in between were the ones she passed through before she came home. A Brussels apartment her father walked out of when she was six, a Kent boarding school where she taught herself English by listening, a Mayfair walk-up above a provision shop, a chalet on a Swiss mountain where she became a wife and then a mother, a Roman palazzo in the Perioli district with a wide terrace planted with lemon trees, where she lived for more than a decade as what she herself called a Roman housewife. What follows is a record of those rooms. Brussels, 1929-1937. She was born on the 4th of May, 1929, at No. 48 Rue Keehenveld in the artistic quarter of Ixelles in central Brussels, in a household whose surface elegance concealed a marriage already failing. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was Dutch nobility, the daughter of a former mayor of Arnhem who had served as governor of Dutch Guiana from 1921 to 1928. Her father, Joseph Rustin, was an Anglo-Austrian banker with charm to spare, a bohemian birthplace, and politics that would, by the late 1930s, see him imprisoned in Britain as an enemy of the state. Audrey was the only child of their union, a shy, dark-haired girl who lost herself in books and ballet from the age of five. The Rue Keehenveld apartment was the first of her childhood homes, and it was the one in which her father, in May of 1935, after some unrecorded quarrel, walked out of the family for good. She was six years old. She would not see him again for thirty years. If I could just have seen him regularly, she said decades later, I would have felt he loved me. Kent, 1937-1939. In the summer of 1937, after her parents' divorce, she was sent to a small private school for girls in the Kentish village of Elham, six miles inland from Folkestone, where the chalk downs roll green toward the channel and the Norman church on the green dates from the twelfth century. She was eight years old and spoke a sentence or two of English. The other girls called her Little Audrey. She learned the language by listening, and once a week walked from the school to a studio above a draper's shop on the village high street, where a Russian émigré teacher made her stand at the bar and gave her, in the discipline of ballet, the first private possession of her life. When she danced, she said later, she stopped being the girl whose father had left. She remained at Elham until December of 1939, when her mother, against the predictions of the diplomatic community, came to collect her ahead of the German advance. Mother and daughter flew home to Holland on a KLM flight that crossed the channel low and dark. The Netherlands had been neutral in the First World War. Ella van Heemstra believed it would be neutral in the Second. It would be Audrey's last commercial flight for nearly six years. Velp, 1942-1945. Villa Bukenhof. Villa Bukenhof stood at Roosendalssalaan 32 in the affluent Dutch village of Velp, four miles east of Arnhem, and it was the house in which Audrey Hepburn became the woman the world would later meet. It was a substantial three-story brick villa, built around 1920, with green shutters, a deep cellar, and the kind of solid early 20th century Dutch domestic architecture meant to last a hundred years. It belonged to her grandfather, the elderly Baron van Heemstra. Audrey, her mother, and her widowed Aunt Miesje moved in with the Baron in August of 1942, after the Nazis arrested her uncle Otto, a former judge, and shot him in the woods near Saint-Michel's-Gastel, along with four other prominent Dutchmen, in retaliation for an act of resistance sabotage he had nothing to do with. Otto had been chosen because he was an aristocrat, because his death would terrify other aristocrats into compliance. She was 13 when she arrived. By the time she turned 15, the British 1st Airborne Division had been slaughtered four miles west of her bedroom window, during the failed Allied attempt to seize the Rhine bridges at Arnhem, and the German army had cut off all food shipments to the Dutch civilian population, in retaliation for a railway strike. The winter of 1944 to 1945 became known in Dutch as the Hunger Winter, and approximately 22,000 Dutch civilians starved to death across the Western and Central Netherlands. Audrey came within weeks of becoming one of them. The slenderness the world would later admire, the famous swan neck, the wrists you could circle with two fingers, was the souvenir of those months. She was, by the spring of 1945, also a member of the Dutch Resistance. She danced at Zwarte Avonden, Black Evenings, private concerts held in blacked-out parlors with the doors guarded. The proceeds funneled to Jews in hiding, and to the underground. Her mother sewed her costumes from old curtains, and Audrey choreographed her own routines to Chopin. And at the end of each piece, the dancers received their gratitude in silence, because applause could be heard from the street. She volunteered for a local doctor named Hendrik Visser-Tuft, the head of the Velp Resistance, and delivered the underground newspaper, Oranjekrant, by rolling its tiny squares of paper into her wool socks and peddling them around the village on her bicycle. After the failed Allied invasion, the Resistance asked the family to shelter a British paratrooper who had been left behind. They hid him for three days in the cellar before he could be moved on. Audrey, 15 years old, brought him his food. Her son, Luca Dotti, would later describe his mother as a battle-hardened woman. He meant it literally. On the morning of April 16, 1945, the explosion stopped. Audrey was in the cellar. She noticed first the silence, then a smell she did not recognize, sharp and warm and foreign, which was the smell of cigarette smoke. She crawled up the cellar stairs and saw a man standing in her ruined kitchen in a uniform she had never seen, smiling at her, holding out something brown wrapped in foil. The Canadians had liberated Velp. She had not eaten chocolate in three years. She ate it in the doorway and made herself violently sick. Forty-three years later, when UNICEF asked her to be a goodwill ambassador, she would say yes before they finished the question. Villa Buchenhof was demolished in the early 1970s, and a senior living complex called De Nieuwe Buchenhof now stands on the site. A bronze statuette of the young Audrey, dancing, marks the small flowerbed where the front door once was. It was unveiled by her son Luca in September of 2019. London, 1948 to 1951, 65 South Audley Street. After the war, her body had been wrecked, and her mother sold cigarettes on the black market for penicillin to keep her alive. Yet by the summer of 1948, Audrey was in London, because her mother had decided that her daughter's future lay in ballet. And ballet, in post-war Europe, meant Marie Rimbert. Rimbert was the Polish-born teacher who had coached Nijinsky during the original 1913 ballet's Rousse's production of The Rite of Spring, and had founded, with Nanette de Valois and Frederick Ashton, the institutions that would become the Royal Ballet. She took the girl into her own house at 19 Campton Hill Gardens, a Victorian terraced home in Notting Hill, fed her at her kitchen table, and refused payment. Six months later, she sat Audrey down and told her the truth. You are too tall. Your stamina is gone. You will never be a classical ballerina. Audrey wept. Then she wiped her face and went to find work. The flat she found, with her mother, was at 65 South Audley Street in Mayfair, a five-story redbrick mansion block from the late 1890s with decorative stonework, and a corner curve looking toward Park Lane, a provisions shop on the ground floor, and the famous florist Constance Spry running her atelier next door at No. 64. Ella took a caretaker's position that came with rent-free use of the upper floors, and from this small walk-up, Audrey launched the career nobody had quite seen coming. She joined chorus lines in the West End. She auditioned for everything. She had a single line in the Ealing comedy The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951, and Alec Guinness, who shared the scene, would describe her ever after as a girl with a faun-like beauty he had not been able to look away from. In the spring of 1951, she crossed to Paris to film a small role in a called Monte Carlo Baby. She was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Raphael in a checked dress, waiting for a costume fitting, when a small elderly woman in dark glasses crossed the marble toward her, looked at her hard, and turned to her companion and said, in French, voilà, c'est ma gigi. The woman was Colette. She was 78 years old, in town to oversee the Broadway casting of her own novella. By autumn, Audrey was on a Cunard liner bound for New York, with the lead in Gigi on Broadway, three pieces of luggage, a hatbox, and a small Yorkshire terrier named Mr. Famous. In October of 2025, English Heritage installed a blue plaque at 65 South Audley Street to mark the address from which she had set out, New York and Hollywood, 1951 to 1954. Gigi opened on Broadway on the 24th of November, 1951, to notices that almost embarrassed her with their warmth, and Time magazine put her on its cover before the run was over. While she was still in the show, William Wyler was casting the lead in a paramount picture called Roman Holiday. Having tried and failed to secure first Elizabeth Taylor, and then Gene Simmons. In September of 1951, the British director Thorold Dickinson made a screen test of Audrey at Pinewood Studios, with one unusual instruction from Wyler, who was preparing the location shoot in Rome. Have the cameraman keep rolling after you call cut. Audrey performed her scene. Dickinson called cut. She relaxed, lit a cigarette, and began chatting to the crew, with no idea that she was still being filmed. The candid footage that resulted showed a young woman whose unguarded face was, it turned out, even more interesting than her composed one. Wyler watched the test in Rome and cast her on the spot. Cary Grant turned down the male lead, on the grounds of being too old to romance a 23-year-old. Gregory Peck took the part, and halfway through filming in the summer of 1952, having seen the rushes, called his agent and demanded that Paramount give Audrey equal billing alongside him, an almost unheard of gesture in the studio system of the early 1950s. The girl is going to win the Academy Award, he told them. She did. On the night of March 25, 1954, she walked up to the stage in a white Givenchy gown, accepted Best Actress from the Academy President Jean Herschelt, kissed him squarely on the mouth in her excitement, and then left the trophy in the ladies' room afterward and had to be reminded to retrieve it. Three months later, she won the Tony Award for Ondine on Broadway, and at 25 years old, she had collected in a single calendar year the two highest honors of two separate art forms. It was on the Paris set of Sabrina, that summer, that she walked into the salon of a young French couturier named Hubert de Givenchy, who had been told Hepburn was coming and was expecting Catherine Hepburn. A slim girl in a gondolier's hat walked in instead. I had imagined a sumptuous, mature actress, Givenchy later wrote. Instead, I saw a young woman who looked like a fawn. Within a year, they were the closest of friends, and would remain so for the next 39 years, through every major moment of her adult life. The Bergen Stock, 1954-1963, Villa Bethania. She had met Mel Ferrer at a cocktail party in London, thrown by Gregory Peck, and they had co-starred in Ondine on Broadway, and they had fallen in love during the run. He was 12 years her senior, twice divorced, charismatic and theatrical, and controlling. They were engaged by the summer of 1954. On the 25th of September, 1954, in a small mountainside chapel built in 1892 by the founders of the Bergen Stock Resort, on a slope 500 meters above Lake Lucerne, accessible only by funicular, Audrey married him. She wore a tea-length white organza gown by Pierre Balmain, with chiffon sleeves and a crown of small white flowers in her dark hair. She carried Lily of the Valley. The guest list was kept under 20. Their home for the next nine years was Villa Bethania, a small chalet 100 meters behind the chapel, set among firs, with leaded windows looking down through the trees toward the lake, a soapstone stove in the kitchen, and a stone-walled sitting room beamed in pine. We lived in a fairyland on top of a mountain, Mel later told People magazine. We stayed for ten years. Their son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, was born in Lucerne on the 17th of June, 1960, after two heartbreaking miscarriages, the second at six months following Audrey's fall from a horse on the set of The Unforgiven in Mexico. Audrey was 31 years old and had wanted a child for almost a decade, and motherhood was the role she had been waiting for. She turned down films. She refused American studio demands. She sat on the chalet's stone steps in the mornings with the infant on her lap, listening to him breathe. The marriage itself, in time, grew tired, and by the early 1960s, Audrey wanted a house of her own, Tolochenaz, 1963 to 1968, La Paisible. She found it in 1963 on a country road outside the town of Morgis in the canton of Vaud, 20 miles from Geneva. The house had been built in the 18th century as a working farm and added to over the next two centuries, until it had become a substantial property of 21 rooms across three stories with 12 bedrooms, two stone staircases, five original period fireplaces, terracotta and oak parquet floors throughout, and four acres of meadow and parkland planted with century-old chestnuts and oaks. A tall stone wall ran along one side. The fields beyond opened toward views of the Alps. The villagers called it La Paisible, the peaceful place. Audrey walked through the empty rooms once, stood in the meadow looking up at the trees, and bought it. She would never live anywhere else. She filled the house with floral chintz and country French furniture, English antiques her mother had collected, framed photographs of her sons, and dried lavender in earthenware jugs. She kept a kitchen garden where she grew runner beans, courgettes, tomatoes, and herbs. She kept Yorkshire terriers, beginning with Mr. Famous and continuing across her lifetime. She walked in the meadow each morning with whichever dog was current, in her gardening clothes, with her hair scraped back, looking like the woman she had wanted to be for 30 years and was now permitted to become. Tolochanaz was a village of fewer than a thousand people, set back from Lake Geneva, surrounded by vineyards. The Swiss neighbors treated her with the discretion she required. She walked into the village to buy bread at the boulangerie. She attended the small Protestant church on the square. By 1968, the marriage to Mel was effectively over, and they divorced in November of that year, after 14 years. She was 39 years old, and for the first time as an adult, she was on her own. It lasted six weeks. Rome, 1969-1981, Via Giulia and Via di San Valentino. She had met Andrea Dotti on the and her husband. In the season, she was technically still married to Mel. He was a young Roman psychiatrist, the son of a Neapolitan count, dark-eyed and voluble and charming, nine years younger than Audrey. He proposed on Christmas Day. They were married on the 18th of January, 1969, at the town hall in Morges, Audrey, in a pale pink Givenchy mini-dress. Their first Roman address was on the Via Giulia, the long Renaissance street laid out by Pope Julius II in 1508 and partly designed by Donato Bramante, whose pale ochre facades and shuttered palazzi went gold at sunset, considered by many the most beautiful road in Rome. Their son, Luca Andrea Carino Dotti, was born in Lausanne on the 8th of February, 1970, full-term and healthy after a careful pregnancy spent at La Paisible on her doctor's orders. The family then took a larger apartment in Rome's Parioli district on the Via di San Valentino, a spacious palazzo set on a hill above the Villa Borghese gardens, with high painted ceilings, salati opening onto each other through carved double doors, and a wide terrace planted with lemon trees. For more than a decade, Audrey lived as what she called a Roman housewife. She rose at dawn to see Andrea off to his clinic. She walked Luca to school. She did her marketing at the Campo de' Fiori. She made one film during this entire decade, Robin and Marian, in 1976, only because Sean Connery, one of her favorite human beings, asked her nicely. Her son Luca later collected the photographs of these years into a book called Audrey in Rome, and the images are gentle and unguarded. Audrey in a headscarf and oversized sunglasses on a Vespa. Audrey at a Via Veneto stoplight in a beige raincoat. Audrey pushing a pram in pale slacks past the windows of Bulgari. The marriage, in time, came undone. Andrea was unfaithful, repeatedly and publicly, and the Italian tabloids ran the photographs while Audrey was at home with the children. The 1970s in Rome were also the anni di piombo, the years of lead, when the Red Brigades and other factions were kidnapping industrialists, judges, and the children of the wealthy for ransom. By 1976, Italian police had warned Audrey that her own sons were being followed. On the night of February 23rd, 1976, three men attempted to force Andrea into a car outside his clinic and were thwarted only by the intervention of his bodyguards. Before dawn the next morning, Audrey put her two boys in a car with a single suitcase each, drove them to Leonardo Da Vinci Airport, and flew them home to Switzerland. The marriage limped on for another six years. The divorce was finalized in 1982. She went home to La Paisible and stayed there. Les Paisibles, 1981 to 1992. Robert Wolders was a Dutch-born actor, seven years her junior, the widower of the actress Merle Oberon. They were seated next to each other at a Beverly Hills dinner in 1981. He spoke Dutch, which delighted her. He was kind in a manner she had not known in a man since her grandfather. He had no career ambitions to manage and no interest in managing hers. For the next 12 years, they were partners. He moved into La Paisible. He slept in her bed. He walked beside her each morning through the meadow. By every account from those who knew her, the years she spent with him at the farmhouse were the happiest she had ever known. In 1988, at the age of 59, she accepted appointment as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF. Her first field mission was to Ethiopia in March of that year, during a famine that would kill an estimated 400,000 people. She walked through camps in a white shirt and canvas trousers, her hair tied back with a scarf, holding the hands of mothers whose children were dying. Robert went with her on every trip. Over the next four and a half years, she completed more than 50 UNICEF missions across Africa, Asia, and Central America. She accepted no salary. She paid her own travel costs. Between missions, she came home to La Paisible, where the 60 white rose bushes Givenchy had planted for her 60th birthday in 1989 came into bloom every June, set in the rear garden, where she could see them from the kitchen window. In September of 1992, she went to Somalia. The conditions in Somalia were the worst she had ever seen. A civil war on top of a famine, on top of an outbreak of cholera, and she came home with a stomach ache that would not leave her. The doctors at La Paisible thought it was something she had picked up. By late October, the pain had worsened, and she flew to Los Angeles. On the 1st of November, 1992, surgeons at Cedars-Sinai performed a laparoscopy and found a rare and aggressive cancer called pseudomexoma peritonei, originating in the appendix and slowly coating the abdominal cavity. They operated the next day. One month later, on the 1st of December, the obstruction returned. The surgeon opened her, looked, and closed her. She had perhaps three months to live. She wanted to go home. Hubert de Givenchy, hearing this, made a phone call. He arranged with the American philanthropist Bunny Mellon to lend Audrey her private Gulfstream 4. He had the cabin filled with white flowers. The plane lifted out of Van Nuys Airport on a cold December morning, the pilots descending in long, careful gradients over Switzerland to spare her the cabin pressure she could no longer tolerate. She arrived at La Paisible weighing less than 90 pounds. The morning after she got home, an old friend named Krista Roth came to see her. Audrey was in the garden in the December cold, bundled in a coat, looking up at the bare chestnut trees. I'm so glad I'm home, she said. I can see my trees again. She lived for seven more weeks. Gregory Peck came. Givenchy came almost daily. Her sons came. Robert was always there. On Christmas Eve, gathered with her family in the sitting room, she read aloud a poem she had clipped from a magazine, written by the American humorist Sam Levinson for his grandchildren. For attractive lips, speak words of kindness. For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people. For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry. People, more than things, have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed, and redeemed. Never throw out anybody. On Christmas Day, holding the rail, she came down the stairs slowly and gave each member of the household a small gift. That night, in their bed, she said to Robert in the dark, this is the happiest Christmas I have ever had. On the evening of January 20, 1993, in the bedroom whose window opened toward the rose garden, she fell asleep and did not wake up. She was 63 years old. The funeral was held four days later at the small Protestant church on the Tolochanaz Village Square. Maurice Eindiger presided. The same pastor who had married her on the Bergenstock 38 years earlier, both of her ex-husbands attended. Givenchy attended. Prince Sadruddin Aga Khan delivered a eulogy in French. Gregory Peck recorded a tribute in which he tearfully read aloud Tagore's poem, Unending Love. After the service, the cortege walked the few hundred meters from the church to the village cemetery, and Audrey Hepburn was buried beneath a plain white cross with her name and her dates and nothing else. In 2001, Audrey's son sold La Paisible to a Belgian Swiss couple named Katerina and Jean-Marc Beaujolain, who raised six children in the room she had raised hers. They updated the kitchen and the bathrooms and replaced the chintz curtains. They left the white rose bushes alone, and most of them still bloom every June, exactly where Givenchy planted them in 1989. In early 2025, the Beaujolais put La Paisible on the market for 19 million Swiss francs. The plaque outside the privacy wall still bears Audrey's name and the dates 1963 to 1993. She is buried four minutes walk from her own front door. The cross has weathered. The roses still bloom. Visitors still leave them at her gate. Thank you everyone so much for watching Cultured Elegance. If you'd love to support the channel, you can become a channel member today by clicking join at the bottom of the screen. Thank you everyone so much for watching, and I'll see you in the next video.