The Life and Homes of Audrey Hepburn | Cultured Elegance

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]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.

[00:00:18]The first was a Dutch villa on a treeline street  in the village of Velp, 4 miles east of Arnum, 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, hit 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 Tolichanaz  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 20th, 1993, fell asleep in the bedroom, whose window opened  toward a rose garden of 60 white bushes that Uber Deivoni had planted for her 60th birthday, and  did not wake up. The villagers called it Laibra, 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 to 1937. She was born on the 4th of May 1929 at  number 48 Rue Cayenved in the artistic quarter of Excelss in central Brussels in a household whose  surface elegance concealed a marriage already failing. Her mother Baroness Ella Van Heamstra was  Dutch nobility the daughter of a former mayor of Arnum who had served as governor of Dutch Guana  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 in ballet from the age of five. The Ru Cayenville  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 6 years old. She  would not see him again for 30 years. "If I could just have seen him regularly," she said decades  later, I would have felt he loved me. Kent, 1937 to 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 Elm,  6 milesi inland from Folkston, where the chalk downs roll green toward the channel and the Norman  church on the green dates from the 12th century.

[00:03:31]She was 8 years old and spoke a sentence or two of  English. The other girls called her little Audrey.

[00:03:38]She learned the language by listening and once  a week walked from the school to a studio above a draper shop on the village high street where  a Russian immigrate 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 Elim 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 KM flight that crossed the channel low and dark.  The Netherlands had been neutral in the First World War. Ella Van Heamstra believed it would be  neutral in the Second. It would be Audrey's last commercial flight for nearly six years. Belp 1942  to 1945. Villa Buchananhof. Villa Buchananhoff stood at Rosendal Salon 32 in the affluent  Dutch village of Vvelp 4 miles east of Arnum.

[00:04:47]And it was the house in which Audrey Hepburn  became the woman the world would later meet.

[00:04:52]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 Heamstra. Audrey, her mother, and her widowed aunt Misha 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 St. Michelle's Gastel along with four other prominent Dutchmen, in retaliation  for an act of resistant 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 First Airborne Division had been  slaughtered 4 miles west of her bedroom window during the failed Allied attempt to seize the  Rine Bridges at Arnham, and the German army had cut off all food shipments to the Dutch civilian  population in retaliation for a railway strike.

[00:06:08]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.

[00:06:38]She was by the spring of 1945 also a member of  the Dutch resistance. She danced at Zarta Aendon, black evenings, private concerts held in  blacked out parlors with the doors guarded.

[00:06:53]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 Shopen. And at the end of each piece, the dancers received their gratitude in silence  because applause could be heard from the street.

[00:07:13]She volunteered for a local doctor named Hendrik  Visser Tuft, the head of the Velp resistance, and delivered the underground newspaper, Orana,  by rolling its tiny squares of paper into her wool socks and pedalling 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 3 days in the cellar before he could  be moved on. Audrey, 15 years old, brought him his food. Her son, Luca, would later describe his  mother as a battleh hardardened woman. He meant it literally. On the morning of April 16th, 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 3 years. She ate it in the doorway and made herself violently sick. 43  years later when UNICEF asked her to be a goodwill ambassador, she would say yes before they finished  the question. Villa Bukinhof was demolished in the early 1970s and a senior living complex called  Denua Bukinhof now stands on the site. A bronze statueette of the young Audrey dancing marks the  small flower bed where the front door once was.

[00:09:05]It was unveiled by her son, Luca, in  September of 2019. London, 1948 to 1951, 65 South Oddley Street. After the war, her body  had been wrecked and her mother sold cigarettes on the black market for penicellin 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 Ramire. Ramb was  the legendary Polishborn teacher who had coached Nijinski during the original 1913 ballet's Roose's  production of the right of spring and had founded with Nette Dealwis and Frederick Ashton the  institutions that would become the Royal Ballet.

[00:09:57]She took the girl into her own house at 19 Campton  Hill Gardens, a Victorian terrace home in Notting Hill, fed her at her kitchen table, and refused  payment. 6 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 Oddley Street in Mayfair,  a five-story red brick 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  Constant Spry running her atelier next door at number 64. Ella took a caretaker's position  that came with rent-free use of the upper floors.

[00:10:52]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 Eling comedy The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951, and Alec  Guinness, who shared the scene, would describe her ever after as a girl with a fawn-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 comedy called Monte Carlo Baby.

[00:11:30]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,  voila, samai." The woman was Colette. She was 78 years old in town to oversee the Broadway  casting of her own nolla. By autumn, Audrey was on a conard liner bound for New York with the  lead in GI 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 Oddley Street  to mark the address from which she had set out.

[00:12:20]New York and Hollywood 1951 to 1954. Xi 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 Wiler was casting the lead in a Paramount picture called Roman Holiday. Having tried and  failed to secure first Elizabeth Taylor and then Jean Simmons, in September of 1951, the British  director Thorald Dickinson made a screen test of Audrey at Pinewood Studios with one unusual  instruction from Wiler, 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. Wiler watched the test in Rome and cast her on the spot. Carrie  Grant turned down the male lead on the grounds of being too old to romance a 23-year-old. Gregory  Peek 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.

[00:14:03]"The girl is going to win the Academy Award," he  told them. She did. On the night of March 25th, 1954, she walked up to the stage in a white  givoni gown, accepted best actress from the Academy President Jean Hershult, kissed him  squarely on the mouth in her excitement, and then left the trophy in the lady's room  afterward and had to be reminded to retrieve it.

[00:14:31]Three months later, she won the Tony Award  for On Dean on Broadway, and at 25 years old, she had collected in a single calendar year the  two highest honors of two separate art forms.

[00:14:45]It was on the Paris set of Sabrina that summer  that she walked into the salon of a young French couturier named Huber de Jivoni who had been told  Heburn was coming and was expecting Catherine Hepburn. A slim girl in a gondelier's hat walked  in instead. I had imagined a sumptuous mature actress. Shivoni 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 Bergenstock 1954  to 1963 VA Bethania. She had met Mel Farer at a cocktail party in London thrown by Gregory Pek  and they had co-starred in On Dean 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 Bergenstock Resort on a slope 500 m above Lake Lousern, accessible only  byicular, Audrey married him. She wore a tealength white oranza gown by Pierre Balain 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 9 years was Villa Bethania, a small chalet  a 100 meters behind the chapel set among furs with leaded windows looking down through the trees  toward the lake, a soapstone stove in the kitchen and a stonewalled sitting room beamed in pine.  We lived in a fairyland on top of a mountain.

[00:16:48]Mel later told People magazine, "We stayed for 10  years." Their son, Shaun Heburn Farer, was born in Lousern on the 17th of June, 1960 after two  heartbreaking miscarriages. The second at 6 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.

[00:17:18]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. Toenaz 1963 to 1968. La pesible.

[00:17:47]She found it in 1963 on a country road outside  the town of Morgus in the canton of Vaude, 20 m 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 parkquet 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 Pesi, 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 chints and country French furniture, English antiques her mother had collected, framed  photographs of her sons, and dried lavender in earthnware jugs. She kept a kitchen garden where  she grew runner beans, corettes, tomatoes, and herbs. She kept Yorkshire terriers, beginning with  Mr. Famous and continuing across her lifetime.

[00:19:14]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. Toanaz 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 bulerri. 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 6 weeks. Rome  1969 to 1981. Via Julia and Via D San Valentino.

[00:20:14]She had met Andrea Doi on the Mediterranean  in June of 1968 on a yacht owned by Princess Olympia Toonia 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, darkeyed and valuable and charming, 9 years younger than Audrey. He proposed on Christmas day.  They were married on the 18th of January 1969 at the town hall in Mores Audrey in a pale pink goni  mini dress. Their first Roman address was on the via Julia, the long Renaissance street laid out  by Pope Julius II in 1508 and partly designed by Donado Breante, whose pale ochre facades and  shuttered palazzi went gold at sunset. Considered by many the most beautiful road in Rome. Their  son Luca Andrea Corino Doi was born in Losan on the 8th of February 1970 fullterm and healthy  after a careful pregnancy spent at Lea Zebé on her doctor's orders. The family then took a larger  apartment in Rome's Paroli district on the Via Des San Valentino, a spacious palazzo set on a  hill above the Villa Borghazi gardens with high painted ceilings, salotti 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.

[00:21:55]She rose at dawn to see Andrea off to his clinic.  She walked Luca to school. She did her marketing at the Campo de Fury. She made one film during  this entire decade, Robin and Marian in 1976, only because Shan Connory, 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 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 Annie Deiono, 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 6  years. The divorce was finalized in 1982. She went home to Laazel and stayed there. Le Pazibel 1981  to 1992. Robert Walders was a Dutchborn actor, 7 years her junior, the widowerower of the actress  Merurl 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 Zeblo. 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.

[00:24:54]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 4 and 1/2 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 Perez, where the 60 white rose bushes  Givveni 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.

[00:25:36]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 chalera. and she came home with a stomach ache that would not leave her. The doctors  at LaBebo 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 Cedar Sinai performed a laparoscopy  and found a rare and aggressive cancer called pseudomixoma paritona 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 3 months to live. She wanted to go home. Huber de Jivoni hearing this made a phone  call. He arranged with the American philanthropist Bunny Melon to lend Audrey her private Gulfream  4. He had the cabin filled with white flowers.

[00:26:49]The plane lifted out of Van NY's 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.

[00:27:03]She arrived at Lee Zebli, weighing less than 90  lb. The morning after she got home, an old friend named Christa 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  Peek came. Jivoni aim 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 Levenson 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 20th, 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 4 days later at the small Protestant  church on the Tachanaz village square. Maurice Ender presided. The same pastor who had married  her on the Bergenstock 38 years earlier. Both of her ex-husbands attended. Givvanchi attended.  Prince Sadrudin Aakhan delivered a eulogy in French. Gregory Peek recorded a tribute in which  he tearfully read aloud Tagore's poem Unending Love. After the service, the Cortez walked the  few hundred meters from the church to the village cemetery, and Audrey Hepern was buried beneath a  plain white cross with her name and her dates and nothing else. In 2001, Audrey's sons sold Laebo  to a Belgian Swiss couple named Katina and Jean Mark Bojan, who raised six children in the room  she had raised hers. They updated the kitchen and the bathrooms and replaced the chints curtains.  They left the white rose bushes alone, and most of them still bloom every June, exactly where  Jiivoni planted them in 1989. In early 2025, the Bojouan put Lae on the market for 19 million Swiss  Franks. The plaque outside the privacy wall still bears Audrey's name and the dates 1963 to 1993.  She is buried 4 minutes walk from her own front door. The cross has weathered. The roses still  bloom. Visitors still leave them at her gate.

[00:30:15]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.

[00:30:26]Thank you everyone so much for  watching and I'll see you in the next