Audrey Hepburn’s Son Details Late Actress’s Guilt Over Surviving WWII
"She possibly hated herself" that she got luckier than girls like Anne Frank.
In a new memoirm “Audrey At Home,” written by famed actress Audrey Hepburn’s youngest son Luca Dotti, details of the icon escaping the Netherlands during World War II and the guilt she carried for the rest of her life are revealed.
Dotti writes that Hepburn “was 16 years old, stood almost five foot six and weighed eighty-eight pounds” and just escaped death as German soldiers occupied her homeland, while thousands other died from hunger.
Dotti, 45, spoke to People magazine about the new book and why his mother never played Anne Frank in a movie. In fact, she passed up the opportunity numerous times.
“My mother never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne,” he told the magazine. “She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.”
Dotti writes that after she first read “The Diary of Anne Frank,” she was stunned “because she said, ‘That child had written a complete account of what I had experienced and felt.'”
Hepburn’s son thinks his mother’s memories of that tragic time haunted her, especially seeing cars packed with Jewish families heading to concentration camps. In interviews, she rarely spoke about those times of her life.
“People said they were going to the ‘countryside,'” Dotti writes his mother told him years ago. “‘It was very difficult to understand, for I was a child. All the nightmares of my life are mixed in with those images,'” he continues.
Hepburn, who died at age of 63 in 1993 from cancer, was born in Belgium, but relocated with her mother to the Netherlands during the war in hopes that area would stay neutral. Hepburn’s uncle Otto was executed during the war in 1942 after an act of resistance. After WWII ended, Hepburn and her family moved to Amsterdam.
