Alisande Healy Orme profiles the star who escaped the Nazis and went on to become a global icon, but always longed to reconcile with her Dublin-based fascist father.
This is not to say that the Hepburn-Ruston’s knew and understood that fascism would find its natural end in Nazism, at this point; but the fact that they, along with the Mosleys toured Germany as guests of the Nazi party in 1935 does throw their political beliefs into sharp relief.By the time she was five, Audrey had already been put into a boarding school in Kent, UK,something that, again, was not uncommon for children of her social status in that era.
Her parents meanwhile were living in Brussels, where her father’s career and political connections continued to grow. The next year, in a move that apparently devastated his wife and daughter, he left the family, eventually gaining a divorce in 1938, the same year his former wife would attend the Nuremberg Rally and enthuse about it vividly in an article she wrote for the fascist magazine, The Blackshirt.
In spite of the distances his personal circumstances put between them, when war was declared between Britain and Germany on 1st September 1939, the first thing Joseph Hepburn-Ruston did was travel to his daughter’s school and put her on a plane to Arnhem, the Netherlands city her mother had fled to, hoping the country’s neutral status would spare her and her family the worst hardships of war.
It did not. In May 1940 Germany invaded and the lives of people in that country were changed forever. Audrey would become a very junior member of the resistance movement acting as a courier, carrying messages between different resistance groups and she also danced in shows to raise money for them.
Her mother, meanwhile, is said to have slightly altered her politics in face of the negative impact the Nazi occupation had on her life, but never completely changed her mind on fascism as a movement, a fact her daughter and her Hollywood handlers took pains to hide for the length of Hepburn’s film career, lest the public turn on the young star.
In spite of their differing beliefs, both Audrey and her mother would eventually find themselves starving – as were most of the population – and resorting to grinding up grass to make bread, before being placed in an internment camp for the duration of the war where, unlike prisoners in concentration camps, they were granted limited access to food and Red Cross aid.
For Audrey, who would later recall seeing Jewish families being herded on to the trains that would take them to the death camps, this sparked a lifelong interest in humanitarian work that improved the lives of children, eventually leading to her decade’s long connection with the international aid organisation UNICEF.
In spite of making efforts to secure his daughter’s safety, Joseph Hepburn Ruston continued to support the Nazi party and its efforts to overpower Europe throughout the Second World War. He would be investigated by the British House of Commons for receiving seed money to start a newspaper from Germans with ties to Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels, and like Oswald Mosley, was imprisoned as an enemy of the state for the duration of the war.
When the war ended in 1945, Joseph moved to Dublin where he would spend the duration of his life. By 1950 he had married an Irishwoman named Fidelma Walshe and settled into a life in a smart flat on Fitzwilliam Square.
It was 1960 before the Red Cross put Audrey in contact with her father again, in a poignant meeting in the Shelbourne Hotel, and though he made excuses about not wanting his politics to hinder her career, it was apparently clear to those around them that Audrey’s father never returned the great affection she held him in for the rest of his life.
Nonetheless, his daughter would continue to support him financially, writing to him regularly and visiting him in Ireland when she could. On one of her last visits to Dublin for the 1964 premiere of My Fair Lady, she would visit him at home in Ballsbridge, where he lived until his death in 1980. Joseph is buried in Mount Jerome Cemetery in Harold’s Cross, Dublin. The inscription on his headstone reads: ‘In Everlasting Memory of Anthony Hepburn-Ruston. Always remembered by his loving wife Fidelma and daughter Audrey’.
Similarly, and in spite of the cavernous difference in their politics, Audrey retained a bond with her mother, whose death would follow her former husband’s four years later.
Audrey Hepburn, actress and humanitarian died in 1993, aged 63. She is remembered for her belief in kindness once saying, ‘As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands, one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.’
Image Credits:
Audrey Hepburn Jose Antonio Gelado Flickr
Black and White illustration Shutterstock