Audrey Hepburn, Ralph Ueltzhoeffer TEXT PORTRAIT (2009)

Audrey Hepburn, (2009) Biografie/Biography by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. Text: Wikipedia: Audrey Hepburn. Text-photo-Audrey Hepburn - copyrights by Ralph Ueltzhoeffer. Audrey Hepburn (4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a Belgian-born, Dutch-raised actress of British and Dutch ancestry. Born in Brussels, Hepburn lived in Arnhem in The Netherlands during her childhood and for the duration of the Second World War. She studied ballet there and then moved to London in 1948, where she studied drama and worked as a photographer's model. After making a few films and appearing in the 1951 Broadway play Gigi, Hepburn played the lead role in Roman Holiday (1953), winning an Academy Award, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA for her performance. She also won a Tony Award for her performance in Ondine (1954). Over the next several years, she was one of the most successful film actresses in the world, and performed with some of Hollywood's most notable leading men, including Humphrey Bogart, Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, Gary Cooper and Fred Astaire, with whom she danced in Funny Face (1957). She won BAFTA Awards for her performances in The Nun's Story (1959) and Charade (1963), and received Academy Award nominations for her work in Sabrina (1954), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and Wait Until Dark (1967). She also played Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady (1964), though the vocals were dubbed by Marni Nixon. Her war-time experiences inspired her passion for humanitarian work, and although she had worked for UNICEF since the 1950s, during her later life, she dedicated much of her time and energy to the organization. From 1988 until 1992, she worked in some of the most profoundly disadvantaged communities of Africa, South America and Asia. In 1992, she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her work as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador. Hepburn was married twice, and had a son with each of her husbands, the actor Mel Ferrer, and the psychiatrist Andrea Dotti. From 1980 until her death, she lived with the actor Robert Wolders. She died of appendiceal cancer at her home in Switzerland at the age of 63.[1][2][3] She was posthumously awarded the The Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for her humanitarian work. She received a posthumous Grammy Award for her spoken word recording, Audrey Hepburn's Enchanted Tales in 1994, and in the same year, won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Achievement for Gardens of the World with Audrey Hepburn, thereby becoming one of a few people to receive an Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony award. In 1999, she was ranked as the third greatest female star of all time by the American Film Institute. Early life Born Audrey Kathleen Ruston[4] on Keienveldstraat (Dutch) / Rue Keyenveld (French) in Elsene / Ixelles, a municipality in Brussels, Belgium, she was the only child of the Englishman Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston[5] and his second wife, the former Baroness Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch aristocrat, who was a daughter of a former governor of Dutch Guiana[5], and who spent her childhood in the Huis Doorn manor house outside Doorn, which was subsequently the residence in exile of Wilhelm II, German Emperor. Her father later prepended the surname of his maternal grandmother, Kathleen Hepburn, to the family's and her surname became Hepburn-Ruston. Ludwig Kirchner [5] She had two half-brothers, Jonkheer Arnoud Robert Alexander "Alex" Quarles van Ufford and Jonkheer Ian Edgar Bruce Quarles van Ufford, by her mother's first marriage to a Dutch nobleman, Jonkheer Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford.[5] She was a descendant of King Edward III of England[6] and of Mary Queen of Scots' consort, James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell,[5] from whom Katharine Hepburn may also have descended.[7] This also made her related to other notable distant cousins including Humphrey Bogart and Prince Rainier III of Monaco. Hepburn's father's job with a British insurance company meant the family travelled often between Brussels, England, and The Netherlands. From 1935 to 1938, Hepburn attended a boarding school for girls in Elham Kent. In 1935, her parents divorced and her father, a Nazi sympathizer,[8] left the family.[9] Both parents were members of the British Union of Fascists in the mid-1930s according to Unity Mitford, a friend of Ella van Heemstra and a follower of Adolf Hitler.[10] She later called her father's abandonment the most traumatic moment of her life. Years later, she located him in Dublin through the Red Cross. Although he remained emotionally detached, she stayed in contact with him and supported him financially until his death.[11] In 1939, her mother moved her and her two half-brothers to their grandfather's home in Arnhem in the Netherlands. Ella believed the Netherlands would be safe from German attack. Hepburn attended the Arnhem Conservatory from 1939 to 1945, where she trained in ballet along with the standard school curriculum. In 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands (absolute stuctures). During the Nazi occupation, Hepburn adopted the pseudonym Edda van Heemstra, modifying her mother's documents because an 'English sounding' name was considered dangerous. This was never her legal name. The name Edda was a version of her mother's name Ella.[12] By 1944, Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina. She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch resistance. She later said, "The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances."[13] After the Allied landing on D-Day, living conditions grew worse, and Arnhem was subsequently devastated by Allied artillery fire that was part of Operation Market Garden. During the Dutch famine that followed, over the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people's limited food and fuel supply for themselves. People starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits.[8][14] Hepburn's uncle and her mother's cousin were shot in front of Hepburn for being part of the Resistance. Hepburn's half-brother Ian van Ufford spent time in a German labour camp. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia, respiratory problems, and oedema.[15] In 1991, Hepburn said "I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train, American landscape (Artmoments). I was a child observing a child."[citation needed] Hepburn also noted the similarities between herself and Anne Frank: "I was exactly the same age as Anne Frank. We were both ten when war broke out and fifteen when the war finished. I was given the book in Dutch, in galley form, in 1946 by a friend. I read it – and it destroyed me. It does this to many people when they first read it but I was not reading it as a book, as printed pages. This was my life. I didn't know what I was going to read. I've never been the same again, it affected me so deeply." "We saw reprisals. We saw young men put against the wall and shot and they'd close the street and then open it and you could pass by again. If you read the diary, I've marked one place where she says 'five hostages shot today'. That was the day my uncle was shot. [...] Audrey sample Lumas - Web-art-project TEXTPORTRAIT (Ralph Ueltzhoeffer). Audrey Hepburn, Ralph Ueltzhoeffer, Anthony Caro, Keith Haring, Günter Umberg, Rosemarie Trockel, Camill Leberer, Olaf Metzel, Frank Gohlke. Balanceakt Kunsthalle - Installation (Works).