Private Collection (photographer unknown)
Audrey Hepburn
circa 1950-55 (?)
This woman was and always will be a work of art. She resonated grace and spontaneity and truth all in one, making her a reluctant public model of what her era soon saw as a perfect modern lady. But the image of her global perfection was and is intended, even mislabelled, for those who view her through a superficial and theatrical lens - something that reflects only a filtered version of who she really was.
On no matter what side of the camera, one could say that Audrey Hepburn had a beauty of both the mind and body that was simple and fresh. She was not one who was seeking fame, but rather one who kept bumping into it by accident. Because of this, however, and because of the formative years she lived through in the Second World War, Ms Hepburn was able to cope and to retain a core sense of realness about her in spite of the growing demands from film and fashion industries, many of which wanted to play with and promote her new face. She was like a petal floating in a great big swaying sea: reasonably scared at times of its huge mass and dangerous currents but on the whole confident in and resilient to whatever it sent her way. Her true image of perfection was not that she was in fact beautiful in character and in form, but that she denied being beautiful at all. What she expressed as openly as her skills in acting was her belief that she was clumsy and inadequate in relation to those great and famous people to whom she was often compared. And yet it was because she did not try to change herself for this, and because she remained resolutely private about her outside life, something that she cherished dearly, that she raised herself above that general selection of famous people. She gave herself, perhaps unknowingly, a truly respectable image of perfection for a human being. She is a work of art in that she had class, charm and a lovely sense of humility, and that her eyes will smile at us even when our backs are temporarily turned.
