Movie Review ‘Audrey’: Audrey Hepburn’s Life Explored in New Documentary

When it comes to the leading ladies of the big screen, there are two categories: Audrey Hepburn and everyone else. Elegance, warmth, sly intelligence, patrician manners, and larkish approachability she combined like no other. She was the original People’s Princess.

Many actors cite unhappy childhoods, but few triumphed over such dire privation as Audrey Hepburn. As we learn in the lovely documentary Audrey, which is streaming on Netflix, both her diplomat father and her aristocrat mother, who split up when she was six, were Fascists. Daddy left the family in Belgium and returned to his native England to become a Blackshirt; Mummy wrote op-eds praising Herr Hitler. Audrey was ten, in school in England, in 1939 when her father disastrously miscalculated how the war would play out and sent her back to the Continent. He wouldn’t see her again for 25 years, when as a world-famous celebrity she tracked him down in Ireland. He received her visit coldly and unapologetically, but she posed with him smiling radiantly as ever. She is smiling in nearly all of her photographs; to please was her way.

About the Author

Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith is the film critic for the Wall Street Journal.

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When it comes to the leading ladies of the big screen, there are two categories: Audrey Hepburn and everyone else. Elegance, warmth, sly intelligence, patrician manners, and larkish approachability she combined like no other. She was the original People’s Princess.

Many actors cite unhappy childhoods, but few triumphed over such dire privation as Audrey Hepburn. As we learn in the lovely documentary Audrey, which is streaming on Netflix, both her diplomat father and her aristocrat mother, who split up when she was six, were Fascists. Daddy left the family in Belgium and returned to his native England to become a Blackshirt; Mummy wrote op-eds praising Herr Hitler. Audrey was ten, in school in England, in 1939 when her father disastrously miscalculated how the war would play out and sent her back to the Continent. He wouldn’t see her again for 25 years, when as a world-famous celebrity she tracked him down in Ireland. He received her visit coldly and unapologetically, but she posed with him smiling radiantly as ever. She is smiling in nearly all of her photographs; to please was her way.