Audrey Hepburn Net Worth. Audrey Hepburn is a British actress, model, dancer, and philanthropist. Hepburn was a Hollywood star during the Golden Era, and she is renowned for her roles in film and fashion.
She was inducted into the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame and was voted third greatest female screen legend in Golden Age Hollywood by the American Film Institute.
Her breakthrough year was in 1953, when she received three coveted accolades for a single performance in the film Roman Holiday: a BAFTA Award, Golden Globe Award, and an Academy Award.
She would go on to become a legend whose legacy speaks for itself, rising to become one of the best female screen performers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. She was a wonderful lady who had a great deal of talent.
Early Life and World War II
Audrey Kathleen Ruston was born in Ixelles, Belgium, on May 16, 1929. Her father, Joseph, was a British national born in Austria-Hungary. Her mother, Baroness Ella van Heemstra, was a Dutch noblewoman.
Hepburn grew up in shelter and privilege, acquiring fluency in several languages such as Dutch, English, French, and Italian because of her parents’ backgrounds and frequent travel.
Hepburn’s father left the family when she was six years old and went to London, where he became involved in pre-war Fascist activities.
Hepburn was transferred to Kent, England in 1937 to obtain an education after staying on a family estate in Arnhem, Netherlands. Her parents divorced the following year, legally.
Hepburn was moved back to Arnhem after World War II broke out, and she attended the Arnhem Conservatory from 1939 until 1945.
The German invasion of the Netherlands had a profound effect on Hepburn’s family, with Otto van Limburg Stirum being executed as a result of his involvement in the resistance and her half-brother Ian being sent to a Berlin labor camp.
Hepburn worked at a hospital and danced to generate money for the Dutch resistance while his family moved from Arnhem to Velp, where he lived with Hepburn’s grandpa.
Hepburn suffered from breathing issues, anemia, and malnutrition-related edema during the Dutch famine of 1944.
AUDREY HEPBURN THE MOTHER
Audrey Hepburn stopped acting for a decade after the birth of her first son Sean in 1960, according to The Guardian. The star placed a high value on motherhood.
She didn’t make a sacrifice by staying at home with her children; it was what she chose to do, according to Hepburn. Sean, her son, thinks this was caused by Hepburn’s difficult upbringing.
Her mother was not affectionate, and her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, abandoned the family when she was a child, according to LiveAbout.
Despite this, Sean and his brother were not born in Hollywood. In Switzerland and Rome, Hepburn raised her children. They had a regular childhood despite their mother being an icon.
When she picked up her son Luca from school and did everything an ordinary mother would do, he had no idea how famous his mother was, according to Per Closer Weekly.
Hepburn also lived in the Swiss countryside with her children and kept her life simple. Hepburn had several miscarriages before finally giving birth to Sean, which Sean has attributed to their unique connection.
Sean has claimed that their mother left her family an tremendous legacy, compensating for the fact that she is not physically there (per The Film Stage).
He didn’t fully realize how much she was loved by the rest of the world until she died and was buried. Sean thinks that their upbringing as children prepared them for the wider world.
The brothers went on to establish the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, according to AmoMama, to raise money for charity.
Entertainment career
1945–1952: Ballet studies and early acting roles
Hepburn started ballet training under Sonia Gaskell, a prominent figure in Dutch dance, and Russian tutor Olga Tarasova after the war ended in 1945, with her mother and siblings.
Ella worked as a cook and housekeeper for a wealthy family to support the family after their fortune had been lost during the war.
In Seven Lessons (1948), an educational travel film directed by Charles van der Linden and Henry Josephson, Hepburn made her cinema debut as an air stewardess in Dutch.
Hepburn accepted a ballet scholarship with Ballet Rambert, which was then situated in Notting Hill, and relocated to London later that year.
She dropped the name “Ruston” and supplemented her income with part-time modeling.
She chose to concentrate on acting after hearing from Rambert that, due to her height and frail constitution (the consequence of wartime malnutrition), she would never be able to achieve the position of prima ballerina.
Hepburn debuted as a chorus girl in the West End musical theatre revues High Button Shoes (1948) at the London Hippodrome and Cecil Landeau’s Sauce Tartare (1949) and Sauce Piquante (1950) at the Cambridge Theatre, while Ella worked menial jobs to support them.
She also worked as a dancer in Ciro’s London, a prominent nightclub in London, in 1950. She performed in an exceptionally “ambitious” revue called Summer Nights.
She practiced elocution training with actor Felix Aylmer throughout her theatrical career to improve her voice.
Hepburn was registered as a freelance actress with the Associated British Picture Corporation (ABPC) after being spotted by casting director Margaret Harper-Nelson while performing in Sauce Piquante.
She had minor appearances in the films One Wild Oat, Laughter in Paradise, and The Lavender Hill Mob (all 1951), as well as the BBC Television drama The Silent Village.
She played a talented ballerina who performed all of her own dancing sequences in Thorold Dickinson’s Secret People (1952), which was her first significant supporting part.
Hepburn accepted a tiny part in Monte Carlo Baby (French: Nous Irons à Monte Carlo, 1952), which was shot in Monte Carlo and starred both in English and French.
Colette, a French novelist, saw Hepburn in the lead role of the Broadway play Gigi and picked her for it by coincidence at the Hôtel de Paris in Monte Carlo.
Hepburn needed private coaching after going into rehearsals having never spoken on stage. Despite criticism that the stage version was inferior to the French film adaptation, Gigi received praise when she opened at the Fulton Theatre on November 24, 1951.
Her quality is so winning and right that she is the success of the evening, The New York Times remarked of her, calling her a “hit.”
For her performance, Hepburn won a Theatre World Award. The drama ran 219 times before embarking on a tour that started in Pittsburgh and included Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., and ended on May 31, 1952. Before closing on May 16, 1953 in San Francisco, it played in Los Angeles and C.C.
1953–1960: Roman Holiday and stardom
Hepburn starred as Princess Ann, a European princess who escapes the constraints of monarchy and has a crazy night out with an American reporter (Gregory Peck), in Roman Holiday (1953).
Thorold Dickinson made a screen test with the young starlet and sent it to director William Wyler in Rome, who was preparing Roman Holiday, shortly after Secret People was finished but before its premiere on September 18, 1951.
As a consequence of the experiment, a number of the producers at Paramount have shown interest in casting her, Wyler wrote to Dickinson in a warm letter of appreciation.
Elizabeth Taylor was initially sought for the part by the film’s producers, but Wyler was so pleased with Hepburn’s screen test that he chose her instead. “She had everything I was looking for: magnetism, purity, and talent,” Wyler later said.
She was also quite entertaining. Originally, the film’s title was to be just “Introducing Audrey Hepburn,” with “Gregory Peck” written in smaller type beneath it. She was absolutely enchanting, and we said, ‘That’s the girl!'”
You’ve got to change that because she’ll be a big star, and I’ll look like a big jerk, Peck advised Wyler, suggesting that he raise her to equal billing so her name appeared before the title and in type as large as his.
Hepburn unexpectedly won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, a BAFTA Award for Best British Actress in a Leading Role, and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama in 1953. The film was a box-office hit and garnered critical acclaim for her performance.
A. in The New York Times wrote a review. H. “Audrey Hepburn is not precisely a newcomer to films,” Weiler wrote.
Princess Anne is a slender, elfin, and wistful beauty who alternately regal and childlike in her profound appreciation of newly-found, simple pleasures and love. She is the British actress starring for the first time as Princess Anne.
She is a pitifully lonely figure facing a stuffy future, even though she bravely smiles her acknowledgment of the end of that affair.”
Hepburn was given a seven-picture deal with Paramount, with the first picture being released in 12 months. She became well-known for her own style and was featured on the cover of Time magazine on September 7, 1953.
Hepburn starred in Billy Wilder’s love Cinderella-story drama Sabrina (1954), as wealthy brothers (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden) struggle for the heart of their chauffeur’s innocent daughter.
She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in 1954, and she also won a BAFTA Award for her performance.
A young lady of exceptional range of sensitive and moving emotions inside such a delicate and fragile form, according to Bosley Crowther of The New York Times.
No more can be said about her than that she is even more dazzling as the daughter and pet of the servants’ hall than she was last year.”
In the fantasy play Ondine on Broadway, Hepburn reprised her stage career in 1954, playing a water nymph who falls in love with a human.
Somehow, Miss Hepburn is able to convey [its intangibles] into the vocabulary of the theatre without artfulness or precociousness, said a reviewer for The New York Times. She delivers a powerful performance that is graceful and delightful, with an innate sense for the realities of theatrical performance.”
Three days after winning the Academy Award for Roman Holiday, she earned a Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play.
She is one of three actresses to win both the Academy Award and the Tony Award for Best Actress in the same year (the other two are Shirley Booth and Ellen Burstyn).
Hepburn and her co-star Mel Ferrer started dating during the filming, and on September 25, 1954, in Switzerland, they married.
Hepburn received the Golden Globe for World Film Favorite in 1955, despite the fact that she didn’t appear in any new film releases that year.
She starred in a series of successful films throughout the remainder of the decade, including her BAFTA- and Golden Globe-nominated performance as Natasha Rostova in War and Peace (1956), becoming one of Hollywood’s most popular box-office attractions.
Henry Fonda and her husband Mel Ferrer feature in this Tolstoy tale set during the Napoleonic wars.
In her first musical picture, Funny Face (1957), Fred Astaire, a fashion photographer, falls in love with a beatnik bookseller (Hepburn) and agrees to take her on a free trip to Paris.
With Gary Cooper and Maurice Chevalier, Hepburn co-starred in the romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon (released in 1957).
In The Nun’s Tale (1959), alongside co-star Peter Finch, Hepburn portrayed Sister Luke in a film about the character’s battle to become a nun.
Hepburn was nominated for a third Academy Award and won her second BAFTA Award for her portrayal of Katharine Houghton. Variety writes about it:
Henry Hart of Films in Review observed that Hepburn’s performance “will always silence those who have believed she was less an actress than a symbol of the sophisticated child/woman.”
I poured more time, energy, and attention into this character than to any of my prior screen roles, Hepburn said after a year of researching and working on the role.
Hepburn earned a tepid response for her performance as Rima, a jungle girl who falls in love with a Venezuelan wanderer, in the romantic adventure Green Mansions (1959), which she co-starred with Anthony Perkins.
In addition, she co-starred with Burt Lancaster and Lillian Gish in The Unforgiven (1960), her sole western picture.
1961–1967: Breakfast at Tiffany’s and continued success
In Blake Edwards’ Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961), a film based on the Truman Capote novella of the same name, Hepburn starred as New Yorker Holly Golightly.
Although he would have preferred Marilyn Monroe to play the part, Capote disliked several alterations made to clean up the tale for the film version, and thought Hepburn “did a terrific job.”
The role of Hepburn’s character has been described as one of the most recognized in American cinema. Her clothing during the opening sequences has been referred to as an symbol of the twentieth century, and maybe even the most renowned “little black dress” in history.
I’m an introvert, Hepburn admitted, but said the part was “the jazziest of my career.” She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as the extraverted girl. It was the most difficult role she ever played.
Hepburn co-starred with Shirley MacLaine as instructors whose lives become complicated when two pupils accused them of being lesbians in William Wyler’s drama The Children’s Hour (1961).
With the exception of Hepburn, who “gives the impression of being sensitive and pure” of its “muted theme,” The New York Times’ Bosley Crowther thought that the film “is not too well acted.”
Hepburn’s “soft sensitivity, exquisite projection, and emotional understatement” were likewise praised by Variety magazine, which said that she and MacLaine “beautifully complement each other.”
Hepburn followed up her role as a young widow pursued by many males in pursuit of the money stolen by her murdered spouse in the comic thriller Charade (1963).
Grant, who was 59 years old at the time and had previously appeared in Roman Holiday and Sabrina as a leading male lead, was embarrassed about his age difference with Hepburn and uncomfortable with the romantic interplay.
To placate his worries, the producers decided to rewrite the script so that Hepburn’s character was pursuing him.
All I want for Christmas is another picture with Audrey Hepburn, he remarked of the film, which garnered her third and final competitive BAFTA Award and a Golden Globe nomination.
Hepburn is cheerfully committed to a mood of how-nuts-can-you-be in an obviously comforting collection of expensive Givenchy clothes, Bosley Crowther wrote, describing her performance as less than kind.
In Paris When It Sizzles (1964), a screwball comedy in which she portrays the young assistant of a Hollywood screenwriter, who assists his writer’s block by acting out his ideas for plausible storylines, Hepburn reunited with her Sabrina co-star William Holden.
Many issues arose during the production of this film. Holden’s alcoholism was beginning to affect his work, and he tried unsuccessfully to rekindle a romance with the now-married Hepburn.
When she saw the unflattering dailies during principal shooting, she demanded that cinematographer Claude Renoir be fired.
Since her lucky number was 55, she insisted on having a dressing room there, and Hubert de Givenchy, her long-time designer, was required to be credited in the film for her perfume.
The picture was “uniformly panned” upon its release in April, but reviewers were gentler to Hepburn’s performance, describing her as “a refreshingly individual creature in an age of the exaggerated curve.”
George Cukor’s film adaptation of the stage musical My Fair Lady, which premiered in October 1964, was Hepburn’s second picture to be released in 1964.
Although Hepburn’s casting in the part of Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle was a source of contention, Soundstage wrote that “not since Gone with the Wind has a film generated such universal anticipation.”
Producer Jack L. Warner did not offer Julie Andrews the part because she had originated it on stage. Hepburn, according to Warner, was a more “bankable” star.
Warner was first asked to give the part to Andrews, but Hepburn was cast in the end.
Further friction was generated when Marni Nixon, whose voice was deemed more appropriate to the part than Hepburn’s, dubbed Hepburn’s vocals despite the fact that she had sung in Funny Face and had lengthy vocal preparation for the part in My Fair Lady. When informed, Hepburn became enraged and walked off set.
Hepburn’s performance was praised by critics. “The finest thing about [My Fair Lady] is Audrey Hepburn superbly supports Jack Warner’s choice to cast her in the lead role,” Crowther wrote, citing Gene Ringgold of Soundstage.
Everyone felt that if Julie Andrews wasn’t going to be in the film, Audrey Hepburn was the perfect selection, she remarked when asked who she is Eliza for the ages.
Her “graceful, glamorous performance” was “the best of her career,” according to the reviewer in Time magazine. At the 37th Academy Awards in 1964, Andrews received an Oscar for Mary Poppins, although Hepburn was not nominated.
Hepburn, on the other hand, was nominated for both a Golden Globe and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress.
Hepburn appeared in a variety of genres as the decade progressed, including the heist comedy How to Steal a Million (1966).
Hepburn portrayed the daughter of a renowned art collector, whose forgeries are about to be revealed as fakes. Her father’s fortune is made up entirely of them.
In the film, she portrays a devoted daughter who enlists the aid of Peter O’Toole’s character to assist her father. In 1967, there were two more films based on the novel. The first was Two for the Road, a British dramedy that follows a couple’s rocky marriage from beginning to end.
Hepburn was more free and joyful than she had ever been, according to director Stanley Donen, who credited her co-star Albert Finney for that.
Wait Until Dark is a mystery thriller in which Hepburn showed off her acting versatility by portraying a scared blind woman in the second film. It was a challenging project for her because the husband, Mel Ferrer, was also the film’s producer.
Under the duress, she shed fifteen pounds, but she was comforted by co-star Richard Crenna and director Terence Young.
Hepburn portrays the sensitive part, the quickness with which she alters and the ability with which she conveys dread attract sympathy and alarm to her, Bosley Crowther remarked of Hepburn’s fifth and last competitive Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.
Audrey Hepburn Net Worth
Audrey Hepburn was a British-Dutch actress, fashion icon, and philanthropist who was regarded as one of Hollywood’s best female screen legends during the Golden Era. In 1993, when Audrey Hepburn died, she had a net worth of $55 million.
After inflation adjustment, that’s equivalent to $100 million in current dollars. At the age of 63, Hepburn passed away on January 20, 1993. During Hollywood’s Golden Era, she was regarded as a cinema and fashion legend.
She rose to superstardom in 1953 with the romantic comedy “Roman Holiday,” for which she got an Oscar for Best Actress, after first performing on stage and in supporting parts on cinema. She subsequently starred in such classics as “Funny Face,” “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” and “Charade.”
Hepburn focused much of her attention as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador towards the conclusion of her life.
AUDREY HEPBURN’S SONS BATTLED OVER HER ESTATE
Audrey Hepburn’s last years were dedicated to UNICEF (via Biography) as a goodwill ambassador, rather than acting.
Because of her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland, she felt compelled to go across the globe to raise awareness for children in need. Hepburn became unwell after a trip to Somalia and was found to have colon cancer (per LiveAbout).
Hepburn died of the illness on January 20, 1993, at the age of 63. Sean and Luca, her two sons, survive her.
Hepburn was worth $55 million at the time of her death, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Hepburn’s handwritten will stated that her two boys would receive 50/50 of her estate, according to The Law Offices of DuPont & Blumenstiel. A storage locker in Los Angeles contained mementos and relics from throughout his career.
Hepburn, on the other hand, failed to say who would get what. The brothers subsequently requested that the items be split up by a court. When Sean filed a lawsuit against Luca, they entered into a contract with Christie’s Auction House.
They reached an agreement in 2015, according to the Daily Mail. The objects were divided into three groups: things they would each keep, things they already had, and things that would be given to the auction house.
They would also split the money from the auction evenly between them. According to the Washington Times, Christie’s auction raised $6.2 million in 2017. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” alone fetched almost $900,000 in Hepburn’s personal script.
Audrey Hepburn had a complicated relationship with food
Audrey Hepburn granted extensive interviews to biographer Diana Maychick prior to her death in 1993, for her book Audrey Hepburn:
Later that year, posthumously, his book Intimate Portrait was released. Maychick eventually concluded that Hepburn’s petite form was due to an eating problem, according to a review in the Chicago Tribune.
Her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II was marked by malnutrition and near-starvation, which gave rise to her beliefs.
Maychick claims that Hepburn’s wartime starvation drove her to “hate” food and treat it as a commodity to be managed.
Hepburn told Maychick of growing up hungry during the war, “Of course, I took it to an extreme.” I resolved to master food; I told myself I didn’t need it.
Maychick stated that when Hepburn observed her pals, neighbors, and even her love Uncle Otto jailed and ultimately killed, she felt survivor’s guilt, which may have contributed to her complicated feelings about food and decision to skip meals.
Why was I given a pass when others weren’t? “I kept asking myself over and over…” Hepburn stated.
