Welcome Home, Audrey
I remember when my mother came to visit my first student flat in London. She was moved and I could not figure out why. Her dreamy eyes were seeing things that I could not see. The high street suddenly awoke images of her own formative years, a little known time of her life.
For her, London had been a time for healing and hoping – a transition between childhood and adult life – tragedy and fame. She had left England with her mother at the onset of war. They came back with a hundred pounds in their pockets, after being on the verge of starvation during the Dutch ‘Hunger winter’ of 1944-5.
Mother had been offered a scholarship at the Rambert Ballet School, but the dream of becoming a solo ballerina soon vanished. London, however, was no place for regrets. She got a gig in the chorus line of a show called Sauce Tartare at the Cambridge Theatre (the sequel was obviously Sauce Piquante), but it was not enough to make ends meet, not even living on the baked beans diet she enjoyed so much at the time. When the curtain came down she would therefore move with the other girls to Ciro’s nightclub to perform in revues.
Like Eliza Doolittle, she had to learn it all. She had to learn how to speak, as the first line she ever pronounced on stage in High Button Shoes at the Hippodrome was barely audible. She had to learn to live with her flaws, real or imaginary: she thought she was too tall, her feet and ears too big and the rest of it definitely too flat. So when the great photographer Antony Beauchamp bumped into her backstage at the Cambridge Theatre and asked if he could take a few pictures, she first declined politely, explaining that she could not afford them. The photos were published in British Vogue, and soon ‘moonlighting’ at Ciro’s stopped being necessary.
It is therefore so fitting that we can reconnect with that British girl here, so close to the former nightclub, which now hosts the public archives of the National Portrait Gallery. This thorough, iconographic study, curated by Terence Pepper and Helen Trompeteler, allows me and my brother Sean to grasp fragments of an otherwise unreachable past.
The experience is all the more rewarding as the exhibition strives to go behind the scenes and provides rare insights into the making of a woman, following her rise from her London debut to the stardom of the 1950s and 1960s until the last season of her life, marked by restless humanitarian engagement on the frontline of forgotten crises.
She would be honoured to be here. And glad to be back home.
Audrey Hepburn: Portraits Of An Icon, from 2 July to 18 October at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London WC2: 020-7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk
Pictures: Philipe Halsman, Norman Parkinson archive, Douglas Kirkland, and Bert Hardy/Getty
For her, London had been a time for healing and hoping – a transition between childhood and adult life – tragedy and fame. She had left England with her mother at the onset of war. They came back with a hundred pounds in their pockets, after being on the verge of starvation during the Dutch ‘Hunger winter’ of 1944-5.
Mother had been offered a scholarship at the Rambert Ballet School, but the dream of becoming a solo ballerina soon vanished. London, however, was no place for regrets. She got a gig in the chorus line of a show called Sauce Tartare at the Cambridge Theatre (the sequel was obviously Sauce Piquante), but it was not enough to make ends meet, not even living on the baked beans diet she enjoyed so much at the time. When the curtain came down she would therefore move with the other girls to Ciro’s nightclub to perform in revues.
Like Eliza Doolittle, she had to learn it all. She had to learn how to speak, as the first line she ever pronounced on stage in High Button Shoes at the Hippodrome was barely audible. She had to learn to live with her flaws, real or imaginary: she thought she was too tall, her feet and ears too big and the rest of it definitely too flat. So when the great photographer Antony Beauchamp bumped into her backstage at the Cambridge Theatre and asked if he could take a few pictures, she first declined politely, explaining that she could not afford them. The photos were published in British Vogue, and soon ‘moonlighting’ at Ciro’s stopped being necessary.
It is therefore so fitting that we can reconnect with that British girl here, so close to the former nightclub, which now hosts the public archives of the National Portrait Gallery. This thorough, iconographic study, curated by Terence Pepper and Helen Trompeteler, allows me and my brother Sean to grasp fragments of an otherwise unreachable past.
The experience is all the more rewarding as the exhibition strives to go behind the scenes and provides rare insights into the making of a woman, following her rise from her London debut to the stardom of the 1950s and 1960s until the last season of her life, marked by restless humanitarian engagement on the frontline of forgotten crises.
She would be honoured to be here. And glad to be back home.
Audrey Hepburn: Portraits Of An Icon, from 2 July to 18 October at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London WC2: 020-7306 0055, www.npg.org.uk
Pictures: Philipe Halsman, Norman Parkinson archive, Douglas Kirkland, and Bert Hardy/Getty