3 December 2020 10:55

Funny grace

Audrey Hepburn is Darcey Bussell’s favourite film star, a unique mover with an unmatchable energy. But it all began in the dance studio. Vera Rule discovers how ballet made Audrey Hepburn.

'I had no greater inspiration to want to dance than the old movies. Fred Astaire, Ginger Rogers, Gene Kelly and Audrey Hepburn were all heroes of mine. But I particularly loved Audrey, her grace and style in her movies reflected her love of dance and her dance training. Poignantly, the young Audrey danced in occupied Holland during the war and after the war, she finished her ballet training in London. Some of my favourite films were when she danced with Fred Astaire. Over the years I have had the pleasure to meet her two sons and her last partner, Robert Wolders…and speaking to them brought so much of what I knew to life.'

Dame Darcey Bussell DBE, President of the Royal Academy of Dance

Even in her early screen roles, Audrey Hepburn made an impression. Powerful eyebrows (out of fashion for 35 years) and a thick fringe (not popular above the age of ten since 1930). She’s ladylike and fresh; her sexuality comes over only as impish naughtiness. Viewers might have wondered what her backstory could’ve been. European refugee? Child of a marriage of many places?

That was Hepburn’s own past. She was the daughter of an Anglo-Austrian businessman and a Dutch baroness, brought up between Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands. Sounds privileged, lived less so, especially when her mother took her back from an English school to Arnhem, thinking it to be the safer place as war began in 1939. It was not.

It was five years of fear (one elder brother taken for forced labour in Germany, the other a resistance organiser; relatives and neighbours shot); of lost homes and possessions, and in the last war winter, near starvation on flour ground from tulip bulbs, a single potato eked into gruel. Hepburn’s limbs swelled with oedema. What sustained her, when her undernourished body permitted the exercise, was ballet. She started it at English boarding school, was inspired by a Sadler’s Wells tour performance in 1940 and managed to study dance at Arnhem Academy, wearing slippers homemade of felt scraps in lieu of pointe shoes.

Somehow Hepburn came through all that, though underweight with poor muscle tone, plus a season of severe depression, determined to be a ballerina. Her mother scrabbled for work in Amsterdam so Hepburn could study there with Sonia Gaskell (ex-Ballets Russes), then willingly moved to London to mop floors so her daughter could win a scholarship with Marie Rambert. Ronald Hynd, another Rambert student, remembered she already radiated calm and a unique energy, never mentioning her hard circumstances. Dancers didn’t. ‘Somehow dancing makes you strong,’ he said of Hepburn. ‘Toughens you up, gives you something.’

One thing dancing toughens its devotees up for is disappointment. A year into her studies, Hepburn was not invited to join Rambert’s company. She was too tall. She had started classical training too late. As Darcey Bussell, number one Hepburn fan, points out, her legs and long, narrow feet had never been fed properly or class-strengthened long enough to do their job.

Yet at that nadir, having lost her reason to be, scraping a living in West End chorus lines and modelling, she created the Hepburn persona and look that the world fell in love with, fashioning it out of ballet and her real experiences. Ballet trained her to project younger than her age, while tough times had made her mature in view and independent in choice. Independence determined in detail how she appeared onscreen, too; she evolved for herself the look that has inspired women for almost 70 years, from the start determining her make-up and hair, including Holly Golightly’s hazelnut-swirl updo with almond streaks.

Hepburn's gift to ballet was to show the style and discipline of dancers to the world through cinema.

This is an edited extract from an article in Dance Gazette, the magazine of the Royal Academy of Dance. Buy your issue here.

Audrey

Watch the trailer for the upcoming documentary on the life of Audrey Hepburn.