Tragic Details About Audrey Hepburn

Though she became severely malnourished during the Hongerwinter — the Dutch famine that lasted from November 1944 to April 1945 — Audrey Hepburn could still dance. She put her ballet training to use and performed illegal dance recitals, in the dark and to silent audiences, to raise money for the Dutch Resistance.

In 1948, three years after the end of World War II, Hepburn won a scholarship to Marie Rambert's ballet school in London. According to Financial Times, Rambert later told her that she could not make it as a professional ballerina. "I didn't have anywhere near the technique that other girls my age had," Hepburn said later. Nor did she have the ideal ballerina proportions: She stood at five feet and seven inches, with size 10-and-a-half feet. Still, she refused to hang up her pointe shoes, even while starring in the hit Broadway play GiGi in 1951. She took ballet classes throughout the show's run, and appeared, dancing on pointe, in the drama film Secret People the following year. 

When a Financial Times reporter asked ballerina Alessandra Ferri, who appeared in the 2020 documentary Audrey, if Hepburn could have made it as a dancer, Ferri replied "probably not." "Very few make it. Maybe she would have been a good dancer, [but] not a great dancer," Ferri continued. "But her mission was to give joy to the world in another way, so maybe it was lucky."

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