Audrey Hepburn, a flower of a thousand colors

Few images symbolize the joy of living and the vitality of youth better than the famous shot of Audrey Hepburn riding a Vespa through the streets of Rome, carrying a stunned Gregory Peck. It's 1953, the set of the celebrated Roman Holiday, and Rome was at the dawn of La Dolce Vita.

It was Audrey Hepburn's first starring role, and it was an immediate triumph: the Oscar for Best Actress, her triumphant entry into the Hollywood spotlight, global fame, and her rapid transformation into a style and beauty icon. Audrey became a role model for many women and girls of the time , thanks to her mix of tradition and modernity , her candor and a hint of sensuality . She entered the imagination, she became a legend, but without losing touch with reality and without forgetting her past, when she was Audrey Kathleen Ruston, a slender young girl like many others of her time.

By the time she rose to fame, in her early twenties, the young actress already had a long life behind her, as Audrey (TEA, 2026, pp. 304, also an e-book, translated by Alessandro Zabini), the definitive biography of the star written by her son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, and journalist Wendy Holden , tells us. She had lived in Great Britain and Holland, had had two parents who paid little attention to her, placing her in foster care. She had seen her father, a fervent fascist, disappear from her life and end up in a British prison camp, and her mother return to being a point of reference after years of absence. But, as the book demonstrates, Audrey Hepburn was destined to be many things and live many lives. She was a girl who grew up during the Second World War, while literally at risk of starvation and collaborating with the Dutch Resistance. She was one of the greatest stars in the history of cinema, capable of winning the most important awards in the entertainment world and playing unforgettable roles.

She was a style icon who made the little black dress the symbol of elegance it still is today. But perhaps her greatest contribution was as a humanitarian ambassador for UNICEF in the final years of her life. For Sean Hepburn Ferrer, however, she was above all a caring and attentive mother , as Sean himself stated in an interview: "My mother had a life crowned with success and marked by the right choices, the first of which was her career. Later, however, she chose family. And finally, when we children were grown and had our own lives, she chose children in need around the world: she chose to give back what she could in exchange for what she had received from life. For her, this important and decisive choice held the key to understanding, and perhaps even healing, something that had accompanied her throughout her life: a deep, ingrained sadness."

In this book, enriched with never-before-seen photographs and numerous previously unpublished contributions, it offers a sincere and intimate portrait of the actress: it tells how a shy English girl became the star we remember, but above all the altruistic woman who drew on her own experience of hunger and suffering to fight strenuously for children in countries devastated by war and famine. Audrey is, finally, a moving memoir of a mother written by her son, a moving tribute to a unique woman: a flower of a thousand colors, who somehow continues to emanate her perfume and enchant us with her grace.