Double page of the comic Audrey Hepburn, by Eileen Hofer and Christopher.
A square face and eyebrows. Truman Capote thus defined the face of Audrey Hepburn (Brussels, 1929-Tolochenaz, 1993). As simple as it is forceful, the sarcastic comment of the writer, who opposed the actress starring in the adaptation of his novel Breakfast at Tiffany’s, has instead been the basis on which Christopher, one of the greats of French comics, has drawn to the star in the album Audrey Hepburn (Aloha Editorial), written by the Swiss Eileen Hofer and which has had the collaboration of Luca Dotti, Hepburn’s youngest son and guardian of its secrets.
COMPLICATED CHILDHOOD
Hepburn did not have an easy childhood, even though her mother came from a wealthy home. Her father, a trickster English hunk, left her family behind when the actress was six years old. During World War II, Hepburn lived with her mother and her two half-siblings in Arnhem, in the Netherlands, where she hid her English origins by speaking only Dutch. “Her parents were both pro-Nazis,” says Eileen Hofer by phone from Geneva. “And although her mother repented over time, Hepburn was traumatized by this ideological drift.”
- Furthermore, poor nutrition during the war ended her promising future as a dancer. “Anne Frank is a very present figure in Audrey. Due to age, experiences of the German invasion, due to the geographical proximity in which they lived… Hepburn could also have died during the war: she danced to raise funds for the resistance, for For example, when Otto Frank proposed that she play his daughter on the big screen, there was a moment of doubt resolved with a refusal: the actress was already too old.” The volume dedicates many pages to her childhood and adolescence “because that is where her personality was shaped.”
Hepburn’s entire biography is permeated by that feeling of “what if…”. As the screenwriter confirms, she “many times was at the right time in the right place.” But, she insists, “her chance is accompanied by her talent and her perseverance. She went against the canons of beauty, the established, even against her husbands.” The first, also an actor Mel Ferrer, directed his wife’s career with an iron fist. “It’s been quite interesting to write about him because in the ’50s women stayed at home,” explains Hofer. “Moreover, she did not earn more money than her husband. The opposite of this marriage. Mel was older than her, she had been acting for longer and, on the one hand, she monitored her projects, took care of her wife’s career, although, on the other, “He begged to have small roles in her films, and from there arose the masculine bitterness that ended the couple.”
In the pages of the graphic novel there is, of course, a reflection of his greatest hits — Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade, A Face with an Angel, My Fair Lady, Two on the Road, Alone in the Dark, Robin and Marian —, of her friendship and collaboration with two geniuses, the couturier Givenchy and the filmmaker Billy Wilder, and her eternal desire to be a good mother. “From the beginning, Christopher and I understood that we needed to have his family on our side and be able to consult them for details. There are people from all over the world who know every pair of pants he wore in his films. Luca, the son of his second husband, Andrea Dotti , even gave us access to the passports of his mother and grandmother, with which we were able to specify travel dates that contradicted each other in previous biographies,” notes the screenwriter. “Like his mother, he is a guy educated in humility, he was always available. The three of us shared many hours of zooms and Luca always thanked us for the effort. The little we have fictionalized has been with his consent. And he corrected some errors, such as that Audrey never smoked when she walked, something that women of her generation did not do either and that we had drawn poorly, or she told us numerous anecdotes from her childhood in Italy, about the affectionate relationship between her mother and the maids, for example.
From Italy, Hepburn emigrated in the mid-seventies to Switzerland, where she already had a house in Tolochenaz, fed up with the paparazzi’s persecution and fearful that her children would be kidnapped for ransom.
How do you confront a myth? “Christopher is a clear line artist, and that helps capture Hepburn. I spent a year researching and writing. Because I had to write a book for people who did not know the actress and at the same time for unrepentant fans. An example: alone He made two films with Wilder, but I saw his entire filmography to understand the ascendancy of Lubitsch in him, and its echo in the films with Hepburn. I did not want to disappoint anyone, and I wanted it to be understood in the end that after the horrors of the Second World War, her desire was to live a complete existence. Hence her work as a UNICEF ambassador, in which she devoted herself in her final years. Even, terminally ill due to the cancer she suffered, she made one last humanitarian flight to Somalia.”
2024-01-21 17:12:31
#Audrey #Hepburn #myth #comic
