Throughout the 20th century, Audrey Hepburn represented elegance, playfulness, solidarity and, apparently, success.
With the arrival of the XXI, it became an absolute icon of all this, but already with nuances.
Their problems, their sufferings and their dramas became known.
But no one like her oldest son, Sean, to really know what his mother was like, how she lived and the difficulties she faced throughout the decades.
Hepburn knew happiness, especially thanks to her two children, but she also knew what war, hunger, distance, pain and betrayal were, especially betrayal.
The men in her life betrayed, one after another, the great actress, a fragile woman marked by abandonment and infidelity.
From the beginning of her days she lived insecurity and the lack of belonging to a family, which is why it was so important for her to create her own.
He got it only at the end of his days and thanks to his sons Sean (fruit of his first marriage, with Mel Ferrer) and Luca (born of the second, with Andrea Dotti).
The oldest of them has now spoken about how his mother felt betrayed by so many, and has done so in an interview in the wake of the launch of a new documentary called
Audrey
which has now premiered in the UK and will hit the rest of the world between December and February.
“Audrey's best kept secret is that she longed to be loved,” is heard in the new footage.
Born in Belgium in 1929, but of British nationality, Hepburn's career was relatively short, starting in the late 1940s and ending almost entirely in 1967, when she decided to dedicate herself to her children and humanitarian work.
Her eldest son, Sean, has turned 60 and says that when he was only 12 his mother told him about the infidelities of her then husband.
“I knew there were problems.
My mother sat with me and with bloodshot eyes told me what was happening and asked what I thought.
He was a kid.
I did not know how to
help her,
"muses almost half a
century after that in a conversation with
The Sun
.
But before his two marriages, instability came into his life from his father, Joseph, a former British consul converted to fascism (he raised money for the British Fascist Union) and an avowed follower of Adolf Hitler.
The family remained in Belgium but Joseph left for London in 1935, never returning to see his daughter.
"It was the most traumatic event of my life," she later confessed to her biographers.
However, he wanted the girl to study in the UK, so in 1937 he forced her to go to a school in Kent away from her mother and stepbrothers.
When war was declared, Audrey's mother decided to send her to the Netherlands fearing a bombing in England.
A mistake: the country fell for five years in the hands of fascism.
The girl suffered from malnutrition and had to feed on tulip bulbs.
In 1948 she finally returned to London and there began her career to be a dancer, actress and model;
five years later he would win his first Oscar for
Roman Holidays.
It was not until the sixties when the already successful actress managed to locate her father in Dublin, and supported him financially until his death.
He never stopped being distant, cold to her.
In the mid-1950s Hepburn married Mel Ferrer, with whom she had Sean.
“They always worked and traveled together.
In the years they were together they probably spent as many hours with each other as people who are 35. That implies a toll, "says Sean Hepburn Ferrer now, who admits that Ferrer, actor, director and producer, was not a person easy.
“He thought he had to fight for everything.
He was a difficult person.
He was neurotic in some ways, like perfection.
He was on the verge of being addicted to anger, to rage.
Big feelings united us, but many little things separated us, ”Sean explains of his father.
The actor couple divorced in 1968 and it was then that Hepburn decided to consecrate herself to her son: “He had waited all his life to have a family.
It's everything I wanted ”.
On a cruise a year later, Hepburn met Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti.
They married in 1969 and had their son Luca in 1970. Sean was happy then, because of the arrival of his brother and because Dotti became "a fantastic stepfather."
But as a husband he was not so.
Hepburn was in poor health and had suffered several miscarriages, so her pregnancy with Luca worried her;
while she stayed home, Dotti partied in Rome.
Tricks were the order of the day: the paparazzi captured him with more than 200 women during his marriage.
In the end, her maid ended up confessing to the actress that she brought women home when she was away.
“She was as delicate as possible and my mother already had her suspicions.
It was the sexual revolution of the sixties ”, says the interpreter's son.
The divorce came in 1982. The actress decided to stay in Italy for a while but Dotti did not comply with Luca's visitation regime, and they left for Switzerland.
There came the last two loves of his life.
The first was the Dutch actor Robert Walders.
They spent a decade together and never married.
But she said a key phrase about him: “He is very affectionate, a very affectionate man.
I trust him".
His second great love, until his death in 1993, was the solidarity that led the children through Unicef. Her son says it was a task he loved and that "he risked his life many times, but he saw it as a tremendous opportunity to help." "People would not have known what was happening without my mother's work," he explains now, decades later, when he learns of the importance of the visibility that celebrities give to these causes. “He not only fought for the rights of children but for the right to love, to education, to access to a health system. A father's love is as nourishing as a candy bar, ”says Sean. She had known it for many years.
