Audrey Hepburn

Audrey Hepburn was born in Brussels in 1929 to a Dutch baroness and an English businessman, and spent much of the Second World War in Nazi-occupied Arnhem, where malnutrition left lasting effects on her health. She trained as a ballet dancer in London after the war before an accidental screen test led to a small role in a French film and, soon after, to Roman Holiday (1953), which made her a star overnight and won her the Academy Award for Best Actress in her first major American role. Through the 1950s and early 1960s she defined a new kind of screen femininity — gamine, elegant, watchful — in Sabrina (1954), Funny Face (1957), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) and My Fair Lady (1964), often dressed by Givenchy, whose designs she helped make internationally fashionable. She worked with many of the era's most significant directors and was nominated for the Academy Award five times. In the last decades of her life she largely stepped back from acting to work as a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, travelling to some of the world's most devastated regions — Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia — and using her celebrity deliberately and effectively on behalf of children affected by famine and war. For this work she was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Hepburn died in Switzerland in 1993. She remains one of the small number of performers honoured with Academy, Emmy, Grammy and Tony awards, and her humanitarian work in her final years is now regarded as inseparable from her legacy as an actress.