Years passed and her sons grew. Audrey was lured back to starring film work in 1975 when an offer came to play Maid Marian to Sean Connery’s Robin Hood in Robin and Marian. She delighted in the opportunity to portray a woman in her forties, sort of a more worldly Sister Luke of The Nun’s Story, which she had made sixteen years earlier. But the experience of making Robin and Marian in Spain wounded her soul. Director Richard Lester shot at a frantic pace with multiple cameras rolling at the same time, often in natural light—none of this suited Audrey’s need for the kind of traditional blocking, lighting, and makeup used by the great directors who had groomed her. Nor did it allow for a meticulous study of the script, another of her trademarks and a factor in her success. On the set in Spain she pined for the star treatment of her Hollywood days that so mirrored the politeness of a van Heemstra’s titled European background. There was none of that visible at these grimy locations. Robin and Marian would be the filmmaking experience that made Audrey Hepburn realize her career as a leading lady had ended.
That was okay in the big picture, because she had never aspired to become an actress anyway. When asked or, rather, accused by Dutch interviewer Ivo Niehe of desiring early on to become a screen star, Audrey countered, “No, oh no, I wanted to be a dancer. I still do. (laughs) It still is my dream. And I must say when I go to the ballet, I’m so emotional and moved by beautiful ballet.”
Not that movie producers stopped calling with film offers. With banner headlines about the Hepburn return to the screen resulting in big business for Robin and Marian in spring 1976, producer Joseph E. Levine asked Audrey to portray Kate ter Horst of Oosterbeek in his upcoming epic film about the battles for Arnhem and Oosterbeek, A Bridge Too Far. If anyone in the world could bring authenticity to the role of ter Horst, reasoned Levine, it was this Dutch girl. It would only call for a few weeks’ work, and in the Netherlands at that.
The offer forced Audrey to visit Cornelius Ryan’s work on which the movie was based. “When I read that book, I was destroyed,” she said. “The same as when I first read Anne Frank’s diary.” Audrey had spent her parenting life preaching against war to sons Sean and Luca, to the extent that she refused to sit and watch any war movies they chose. She wasn’t about to make a war movie now, especially not this war movie that would force her to relive the destruction of elegant old Arnhem and the mauling of her beloved Airborne.
Three years after turning down Joseph E. Levine, Audrey and Dr. Andrea Dotti separated. “I was no angel,” Dotti admitted. “Italian husbands have never been famous for being faithful.”
“I hung on in both marriages very hard, as long as I could,” said Audrey, “for the children’s sake, and out of respect for marriage. You always hope that if you love somebody enough, everything will be all right, but it isn’t always true.” As she did with Mel Ferrer and his son, Sean, Audrey nurtured the relationship between Andrea and son Luca. She knew the importance of a father; she refused to say a negative word about either man.
Then she met actor Robert Wolders, seven years her junior. He had been born in Rotterdam and spent the war near Arnhem. After modest success in films and television in the 1960s, he met and fell in love with actress Merle Oberon, a close friend of Audrey. Oberon and Wolders married in 1975 and Oberon died of a massive stroke four years later, at about the time Audrey’s marriage fell apart. Both Audrey and Robert were melancholy when they met; in time they became inseparable.
Wolders was old-school European, quiet and dignified, and earned respect from the opinionated Ella, Baroness van Heemstra. Said Audrey of her mother, “She opposed both my marriages, maybe knowing neither man was going to be totally good to me. But I must say, she adored Robbie; she sensed he was really good to me.”
Finally, Audrey had found peace in a relationship. The couple didn’t marry; instead they retired to a rambling mansion in the guise of a farmhouse two-and-a-half centuries old in the remote village of Tolochenaz, Switzerland, where Audrey could enjoy her sons and her “Robbie,” along with omnipresent dogs, an orchard, and a lush garden that became world famous.
For the first time since the Beukenhof in Velp, she allowed herself to put down roots. She described her home, which was called La Paisible: “It’s a long house with eight bedrooms, lots of shutters, plants growing up things, simple, homey, cottagey. The walls are white, couches yellow and pink. I love bright colors.”
Ella had spent part of the 1960s in San Francisco, where she volunteered to help Vietnam War veterans get benefits. Finally, she ended up living at the house in Switzerland and managing its staff. Said Audrey’s son Luca with enthusiasm, “Ella was fantastic as a person. I grew up with her and I loved her. For a boy growing up, she was more fun than anything else. My mother was extremely sweet. She would never talk about gory things—ghosts, blood, scary things. She would say, ‘You have to love, be sweet, and respect one another.’ At Christmas my mother would give me a tenth red sweater, but Ella would bring me Dracula and Frankenstein [model] assembly kits from the States. She knew exactly what a boy like me wanted. She told me horrific ghost stories, murder stories….Ella was terrifying! When she would tell a creepy story, you would shake all night and love it and ask her to tell it again the next day.”
Meisje moved to Switzerland as well—as her health began to fail, Audrey arranged for her aunt to have the finest nursing care in a facility near La Paisible, where Meisje lived her last three years.
To Audrey’s credit as a loyal daughter and stubborn Dutch-woman, no stories of a Nazi past ever came to the attention of the press from Audrey as Joseph and Ella lived out their lives. When Audrey learned that her father was living in Dublin, she screwed up her courage and visited him there in 1959; he returned the favor and spent time with Audrey a decade later in Switzerland; she would rush to his bedside right before he died in Dublin in October 1980.
Hepburn biographer Barry Paris quoted the baroness’s friend Leonard Gershe, screenwriter of the 1957 Hepburn-Fred Astaire film Funny Face, on the relationship of mother and daughter: “She [Ella] had great humor and so did Audrey, but unfortunately they didn’t have it together—they didn’t share laughs. I adored her mother, but Audrey did not like her very much.” Journalists who spent time with Audrey over the years also saw glimpses of deep-seated contempt harbored by the star toward her mother after what can only be described as a lifetime of Ella’s domination. More than one reporter noticed icy control on Audrey’s face as the subject of her mother came up. Leonard Gershe even said that Audrey had mentioned her mother’s fascist past to him, and it was clear that she resented Ella for it.
Audrey’s son Luca said of his mother and grandmother, “There was this big tension between the two—this big love and this big tension. Now I’ve come to understand that the underlying reason for all that was rooted in the political past of my grandmother. My mother had a very clear black-and-white, good-and-bad notion about the whole Nazi era.”
Elder son Sean said his mother resented “both her parents for their political and social views, which is also why she let all of the family’s titles of nobility die and be buried with my grandmother.” But none of this resentment would be allowed for public consumption because of the van Heemstra–Dutch mastery of self.
In 1976 biographer David Pryce-Jones released Unity Mitford: A Quest and identified Ella in a photograph taken at the Braunes Haus in Munich, the same image Ella kept proudly on display in a frame in Arnhem. But, explained Ella once again, she had been way back then under the influence of an evil husband. In 1984 the biography Audrey Hepburn by Ian Woodward also mentioned the 1935 German connection, but since both Ella and Audrey were still living, the author carefully followed the line of logic that had been established eight years earlier: Ruston was the villain, and Ella merely a pawn. Ella died in Switzerland soon after on 26 August 1984. To the end she received round-the-clock care from her daughter. When Meisje became gravely ill shortly thereafter, Audrey visited her often in the nursing facility. According to Wolders, Mei
sje—who had never remarried—departed the world in 1986 in Audrey’s arms.
Audrey’s half-brother Alex had died in 1979, but Alex’s wife, Miepje, would outlive Audrey by thirteen years and pass on in 2006. Ian Quarles van Ufford, Audrey’s other half-brother, died in 2010.
The most beloved man in Velp, Audrey’s benefactor in the dark days, Dr. Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft, remained a man of action and letters into the 1970s. While on a trip to Switzerland, with plans to go mountain climbing, the man who had deviled the SS and SD in Gelderland suffered a massive stroke and died soon thereafter at age seventy-one. Audrey kept her old Dutch life separate from that of mother and retired movie star, so it’s unknown if she received word of Visser ’t Hooft’s passing.
For all that she would become, Academy Award-winning actress, Givenchy fashion plate, and international jet setter so at home on the Riviera or in Rome or Paris, the war years remained all too close. The sound of jackboots on the cobblestone streets of Arnhem never left her ears. The faces of Jews in cattle cars, adults and children, haunted her. Vivid sunsets in the western sky sometimes became the blood-red curtain of a burning Arnhem. Memories of bombs falling in Velp awoke her at night. The slaughter of Otto and Schimmelpenninck were a gunshot away.
“When my mother wanted to teach me a lesson about life,” said Luca Dotti, “she never used stories about her career. She always told stories about the war. The war was very, very important to her. It made her who she was.”
Audrey spent her last four years of life on the road as an ambassador for UNICEF, trying with her five-foot-seven frame that barely cracked a hundred pounds to will a planet of vengeful adults away from starting wars, because those wars create powerless victims in the children. She knew all about it.
Audrey came back from Ethiopia, Venezuela, and Ecuador in 1988; from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Mexico, the Sudan, and Thailand in 1989; from Vietnam in 1990 and Somalia in 1992 with her heart broken after every journey through barren, contested lands where children were starving. Or dying. Or already dead. She bled for them on the inside until she couldn’t live with the pain anymore.
In an interview with Audrey’s friend, Anna Cataldi, Barry Paris documented a telling moment from October 1992 in Nairobi. Cataldi visited Hepburn to say good-bye after they had been in Somalia at the same time, Audrey for UNICEF and Cataldi on a magazine assignment. “When I hugged her, I was scared,” Paris quoted Cataldi as saying. “I had a shiver. She [Audrey] said, ‘War didn’t kill me, and this won’t either.’ But I had the feeling that sooner or later, war kills you. She was so skinny. I felt something was really wrong.” Cataldi said that Audrey mentioned she was having nightmares about the dead children of Somalia, and couldn’t sleep, and was crying all the time. “She had seen a lot of terrible things with UNICEF, but she broke in Somalia,” was Cataldi’s conclusion.
Luca said that unlike every other mission, where she had found beauty in the children, “When she came back from the Somalia trip, she was devastated. Totally devastated. Hopeless.”
And her health was failing fast. “She wasn’t feeling well,” said Sean. “At first she felt tired. Then we all thought for quite a while that she had caught a bug in Somalia, maybe some intestinal flu or some complicated disease.”
The work on behalf of UNICEF that had been inspired—no, demanded—by the years in Arnhem and Velp attacked her insides as ferociously as the malnutrition and binges and diets plagued a girl who, after all she had endured, could never again master the simple task of eating. As sure as if a Nazi bullet had finally tracked her down, World War II claimed this woman who had cheated death in the Netherlands time and again. The date was 20 January 1993. At the age of just sixty-three, when she should have been vital and happy, enjoying the love of her life, her “Robbie” in their Swiss hideaway and delighting in sons Sean and Luca—both now adults—the war caught up and took Audrey Hepburn in a matter of weeks. The cause of death: abdominal cancer.
Dutch Girl
The Story in Pictures
The 1896 wedding photo of Aarnoud, Baron van Heemstra, and Elbrig, Baroness van Asbeck.
Four of their children, Ella, Geraldine, Meisje, and little brother Willem, pose in about 1913. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
Cornelia van Limburg Stirum’s villa, de Nijenburgh, stands across the street from the Arnhem Muziekschool. To the left of it is the van Limburg Stirum School. Partially visible at far left is the home of the van Heemstras from 1910 to 1920. All would be destroyed in Allied efforts to take “a bridge too far.” (Gelders Archief: 1584-1339, N. Kramer, CC-BY-4.0 license.)
Ella, Baroness van Heemstra, in the early 1930s.
The dashing and mercurial Joseph Ruston, Audrey Hepburn’s father. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
Ella, signing with the Belgian “de” rather than the Dutch “van,” makes a stir with her first article praising Hitler in the spring of 1935 and then follows it up six months later with another after visiting the 1935 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg. Ella’s actions here would cause lifelong problems for her daughter.
Baron and Baroness van Heemstra, Adriaantje’s grandparents, lived at Pietersbergseweg 44, Villa Roestenburg, in 1930s Oosterbeek. Next door sat the Hotel Tafelberg.
Adriaantje poses with Tante Meisje and Oom Otto during an extended stay in Oosterbeek while her parents meet with Hitler. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
Adriaantje loves animals. Here she stands among the hounds of George Butcher, who looks on.
Near the end of her stay in Elham, Audrey (fourth from left) waves the Union Jack. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
The chatty van Heemstras in 1937 on a Sunday in the backyard of Villa Roestenburg in Oosterbeek. From left, Meisje, the baron, Ian, Ella, Alex, Otto, and the baroness.
Adriaantje, seen here with Ian and Alex, experiences her first “Roman holiday” in June 1938 when Ella takes her children to Rome, and Adriaantje flies in a biplane piloted by Don Mario Colonna, Duke of Rignano. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
Today, as in 1940, the elegant Park Janssingel separates main streets Jansbuitensingel (far left) and Jansbinnensingel (far right) in Arnhem. On 10 May 1940 Ella, Adriaantje, and Ian watched the Germans march down these streets. (Matzen Collection.)
Adriaantje at around the time the occupation of the Netherlands begins. (Dotti Collection.)
The Stadsschouwburg Arnhem today.
A performer’s view of the interior of the theater with its two balconies. From the front of the first balcony, in the “Queen’s Circle,” Adriaantje watched her first ballet performances. (Both photos, Matzen Collection.)
Dress rehearsal for the Nazi-approved Mozart celebration of December 1941. Alex Quarles van Ufford is at left, with Adriaantje next to him and Ella second from right. (Dotti Collection.)
Huis Zijpendaal, where the baron, Meisje, and Otto rented rooms from 1939–42. On these grounds among the cats and geese, Adriaantje enjoyed some of her happiest Arnhem memories. (Matzen Collection.)
Audrey’s first public performance is in the nineteenth-century Arnhem Musis Sacrum, which had been renamed the Wehrmachtheim in 1940 and reserved for use as a recreation hall by the German military. (G.J. Dukker, photographer; Rijksmuseum Cultural Heritage Collection, object number 20025991.)
Audrey sits in the hilly Sonsbeek section of Arnhem in February 1942. (Dotti Collection.)
Otto Ernst Gelder, Count van Limburg Stirum, mugs for the camera in Oosterbeek in 1937.
Meisje and Otto pose with Ella at Huis Zijpendaal. (Both photos, Dotti Collection.)
The Sint-Michielsgestel complex held more than 1,000 “death candidates.” Only the main building remains today. (Matzen Collection.)
In Arnhem four days after Uncle Otto’s arrest, Audrey (standing, left) holds Annelies Bouma at a birthday party for sister Hilda (striped dress), who is Audrey’s classmate from the Middelbare Meisjes School and dance mate at ballet school. A third Bouma sister, Maya, sticks out her tongue at the camera. (Van Rossem
-Bouma Family Collection.)
Five black poles and a monument mark the spot where Audrey’s Uncle Otto, Count van Limburg Stirum, and his four companions were executed on the morning of 15 August 1942.
On 16 August, a British newspaper carries the story of the atrocity.
The graves of Alexander, Baron Schimmelpenninck, and Count van Limburg Stirum rest side by side at the execution site. (Both photos, Matzen Collection.)
This artist’s rendition of Villa Beukenhof at Rozendaalselaan 32 in Velp was based on original architectural drawings. The modest (by Dutch colonial-wealth standards) eight-room house with one-and-a-half baths would be home to the van Heemstras for more than three years; its small cellar would serve as refuge from the war. (Matzen Collection.)
Now known in Arnhem as Audrey Hepburn-Ruston, the ballerina is photographed in the summer of 1942. Not until the birth of her sons would Audrey experience anything to rival the joys of dance. (Dotti Collection.)
Reichskommissar Arthur Seyss-Inquart (center) reviews a parade in Amsterdam. By 1944 Seyss-Inquart would commandeer a villa less than a block from the van Heemstras in Velp. (akg-images.)
The physicians at Ziekenhuis Velp lead Resistance efforts in the area. They are (from left to right) Dr. Haag, Dr. Visser ’t Hooft, Dr. Scherpenhuijsen, Dr. Op te Winkel (sitting), Dr. Hartman, Dr. van der Willigen, Dr. Eykman, and Dr. Portheine. (Visser ’t Hooft Collection.)
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