`We were born the same year and went through the same war,” Audrey Hepburn is saying on the phone from her home in Switzerland. ”I was liberated and, unhappily, she was not.”
The subject at hand is a Dutch teenage girl, whose memories Hepburn will be evoking at 8:30 p.m. Wednesday in Orchestra Hall when she narrates ”From the Diary of Anne Frank,” an original composition by Michael Tilson Thomas, performed by the New World Symphony to benefit UNICEF. The piece will have its world premiere Monday in Philadelphia, with Chicago the second stop in a four- city tour.
”Anne Frank recalled in her diary so many facts and experiences which I saw and experienced and which she heard about either through people who brought the food or the radio or whatever to the attic (where she was hiding),” the 60-year-old actress expands. ”It`s incredibly accurate and full of feeling, and I was greatly affected by it when I first read it.”
Hepburn was born in Brussels, the offspring of an Anglo-Irish businessman and a Dutch baroness, and when she was 10, her mother, divorced for the second time, took her and her older half-brothers to the family home in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
”When you`re a child, somehow you`re very resilient. Obviously, fear was something we all had. I mean, you couldn`t speak your mind, and you had to be very careful. I remember the lack of food, and the constant presence of violence. My brothers worked for the Resistance. I wasn`t a member because I was too young, but I was a courier occasionally, when they couldn`t find someone else. I stuffed some messages in my socks and delivered them.
”My uncle and cousin were both taken as hostages and consequently shot, as were so many of our friends, who were in government or were prominent citizens, and were taken as an example. In her diary, Anne writes that university students had to sign allegiance to the occupying army, and those who didn`t were taken away to Germany to do forced labor. In fact, I remember so well the day when my younger brother did not sign the allegiance and was taken off in a truck with lots of other young men. That`s the last we saw of him for a couple of years. He did survive the labor camp center near Berlin. It was months and months after we were liberated, when suddenly the doorbell rang and there he was.
”We found out after the war that my aunt, who had been a social worker, had helped keep alive a Jewish family that was hiding. She was blind, and she had tapped her way out into the street and up the steps with her white stick and delivered food to these people. Thanks to her, they survived. There are so many of these stories.”
Besides her UNICEF work these days, Hepburn is appearing in ”Always,”
in which she plays an angel who dresses in white sweater and white slacks and dispenses advice to returned-from-the-dead flyer Richard Dreyfuss about giving inspiration (”divine breath”) to a young, reckless flyer (Brad Johnson).
Her screen time is 10 minutes, at most, and the part isn`t exactly a memorable one. Still, it is the first theatrical feature Hepburn has made since ”They All Laughed” (1981), Peter Bogdanovich`s off-center romantic comedy. (Three years ago, she did make a made-for-TV movie, a romantic adventure called ”Love Among Thieves,” with Robert Wagner.)
For years, of course, Hepburn has been canonized as some sort of Givenchy-clad princess-an image she says she shrugs off. ”People see a picture, and maybe attach a persona to the actor who is just a human being,” she continues in that distinctive, entrancingly elegant voice. ”I`ve never taken myself that seriously, so I can live with that.”
In the beginning, after the war, she had wanted to launch a career as a dancer. ”But I couldn`t study for too many years when I was young because I hadn`t been properly fed and didn`t have the opportunity. And when I did get that opportunity and went off on a scholarship to a London ballet school, I was already 18 and that`s awfully late. I mean, kids of 11 had more techniques than I did. So I went into musicals, which gave me a livelihood and a lot of fun.”
Appearing in Monaco in a bit part in the film ”Monte Carlo Baby,” the tall, spindly, swan-necked newcomer was spotted by the French novelist Colette, who singled her out for the title role in ”Gigi” on Broadway. That led to the role of the princess opposite Gregory Peck`s newspaperman in
”Roman Holiday,” directed by William Wyler, who cracked, ”This girl, single-handedly, may make bosoms a thing of the past.”
Following that Oscar-winning performance, she starred in an impressive series of films that included ”Sabrina,” ”War and Peace,” ”Funny Face,” ”Love in the Afternoon,” ”The Nun`s Story,” ”Breakfast at Tiffany`s,”
”Charade,” ”My Fair Lady,” ”Two for the Road” and, in 1967, ”Wait Until Dark.”
After that, until ”Always,” she had made only three features: ”Robin and Marian,” ”Bloodline” and ”They All Laughed.” The reason for the inactivity is that she wanted to stay home and be a mother to her children from her two marriages: Sean, her son by actor Mel Ferrer, and Luca, whose father is Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist. (Divorced from Dotti, she has been living since the early `80s with Robert Wolders, widower of Merle Oberon.)
”I have no regrets about not working,” she says now. ”I would have been so unhappy spending time over and over again away from my sons; my whole emotional and nervous system couldn`t have taken it. The decision was very easy. It wasn`t a sacrifice at all. And I was lucky enough at that point to be able to survive without having to work.”
Hepburn does concede that it was difficult turning down some screen roles, particularly the Anne Bancroft part of the aging ballerina in ”The Turning Point.” ”I`m certainly very sorry that I did, but I had to at the time, and there you are. It was a beautiful picture, and I would have loved to have done it, but it didn`t suffer from my absence. You can`t have everything, right? You have to make the choice with which you can live best.
”These days, I get offered a bit of everything-very often parts which I`m either too young or too old for. I`d like to play my age. Either that, or the scripts are violent or not interesting. Also, I think the word is out that I`m not that interested in just working for work`s sake.”
Hepburn says that ”From the Diary of Anne Frank” was conceived about a year ago. ”I said that I wished we could find a different occasion to raise money than just another benefit gala dinner, and I`d love to do something with music, knowing full well that I couldn`t play an instrument or sing or whatever. Consequently, UNICEF commissioned a musical work based on the diary, and Michael Tilson Thomas and I selected passages.”
Hepburn has been involved with UNICEF throughout the years, back to right after the war, when its predecessor, UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), cared for the millions of displaced persons in Europe. (”They provided food and medication and blankets and so forth, and I was among the very happy recipients.”) Since then, Hepburn-an official UNICEF goodwill ambassador-has done work on behalf of the organization for everything from floods in Holland to drought in Ethiopia.
Several years ago, actress Liv Ullmann, another goodwill ambassador, was disturbed that some people had accused her of using the forum for personal publicity.
”I haven`t gotten that kind of reaction, really, but maybe that`s because I`m quite a bit older than she is, and I don`t have a career to publicize,” Hepburn says. ”I do, though, get other kinds of questions. People accuse me of going to Ethiopia, where there`s a Marxist regime. So I get a different kind of `flack,` if you like. But who cares? My answer is that children have no politics. They only should have a full opportunity to be protected and grow and survive.”
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Tickets for UNICEF`s ”A Concert for Life,” featuring the Chicago premiere of ”From the Diary of Anne Frank,” range from $35 to $100 and are available by phone (435-6666) or at the Orchestra Hall box office.
