Audrey Hepburn may not have been the most prolific actor in Hollywood, but many of the characters she played still feel to this day like the ones she was born to play, including perhaps that of Anne Frank. If she didn’t refuse itWhen Anne’s father, Otto Frank, asked her about it, one might imagine that Hepburn felt she did not have the right experience to play the young woman now seen as the embodiment of a Holocaust victim. Princess Anne and Holly Golightly It was all too familiar: Hepburn remembered all too well her own harrowing wartime experiences in Holland, where she starved while hiding from the Nazis.
Born in Belgium, the young Hepburn attended boarding school in England in the mid-1930s. When war broke out at the end of the decade, she moved with her mother to the Netherlands. She studied ballet and danced for audiences that included Nazis (a fact that is unavoidable and much has been said about it), but she also secretly danced for the Resistance. Biographer Robert Matzen writes:“Audrey was a well-known ballerina at the Arnhem Municipal Theatre for nearly four years, so her talent was Dr. Visser ‘t HooftHe was one of the leaders of this movement, who “staged illegal, invitation-only musical performances in various venues with the aim of making money for artists after they had been driven out of the Dutch mainstream by the Nazi artists’ union, the Kulturkaufschutz.”
Hepburn herself said of this period: Interview clip at the top of the postAs time went on, Matzen writes, “At some point during this period, Dr. Visser ‘t Hooft dispatched her to deliver a message and possibly food to one of the downed airmen. Her qualifications were simple: she spoke English fluently, whereas other young people with whom she could easily contact in the village did not.”
In the fall of 1944, “she and her family locked British paratroopers in the basement of their home, the latest in a series of acts of defiance.” Written by David Crow of Den of Geek“By the following winter, they were living there too, afraid to even get out of bed when bombs fell on their little Dutch village of Velp.” Eventually, “when the remaining food ran out, they ate tulip bulbs. And when that was gone, they ate weeds.”
Enduring this ordeal at such a young age had lasting effects: “Matzen argues that this ordeal haunted Audrey for the rest of her life, affected her slender figure, and probably led to her early death from appendix cancer.” It’s no wonder that she spoke little about the war, even after she became an internationally renowned actress (replacing her initial dream of dancing). So Matzen’s research would have a major impact on Audrey’s life later on. Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War IIWhat he is discussing is Storyteller Studio video aboveHer story unfolded differently from that of Anne Frank, which, Matzen argues, itself plagued her with a kind of “survivor’s guilt,” but both women live on as symbols of the lightest and darkest periods of the 20th century.
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Based in Seoul, Colin MaOnershall Writing and broadcastingHe has written papers on cities, languages, and cultures, and his projects include the Substack newsletter. Books about cities And books A city without a state: Walking through 21st-century Los Angeles. Follow us on Twitter CollinhamOnershall or Facebook.
