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As a London chorus girl, she had wangled some bit parts in British movies, e.g., the cigarette girl in the opening scene of Alec Guinness' Lavender Hill Mob. Then a Paramount scout in London spotted her. One picture, called Monte Carlo Baby, called for location shots in Monaco's Hotel de Paris. Just as Audrey stepped into the rays of the klieg lights in the lobby to run through her brief scene as a honeymooning bride, the door swung open and in rolled an old lady in a wheelchair. It was famed French Novelist Colette, one of whose many bestselling novels, Gigi, had just been dramatized in English by Anita (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) Loos. Colette held up an imperious finger to halt the wheelchair as Audrey did her bit before the camera. Then she turned to her husband. "Voila," she whispered, indicating Audrey, "there's your Gigi."
That afternoon a startled young actress listened in saucer-eyed wonder as M. Maurice Goudeket explained that his wife, the great Colette, had personally picked her to play the lead in a Broadway play. A few weeks later, after an expensive exchange of cablegrams and consultations with Broadway Producer Gilbert Miller, Author Loos herself flew to London to confirm Colette's judgment. "I tried to explain to all of them that I wasn't ready to do a lead," said Audrey in New York last week, "but they didn't agree, and I certainly wasn't going to argue with them."
A bit-playing actress who was virtually unknown thus signed up, almost simultaneously, to star in a Broadway play and a Hollywood movie.
Dolls Aren't Real. Audrey's mother belonged to an ancient family in the Dutch nobility; their home was once the Castle of Doom, in which the defeated German Kaiser spent his declining years. Audrey's grandfather, Baron Aernoud van Heemstra, onetime governor of the Dutch colony of Surinam, was a familiar figure at the court of Queen Wilhelmina.
Born in Brussels in 1929, Audrey herself was the product of a divorced mother's second marriage, an unhappy alliance that ended in another divorce when Audrey was ten. Her father, J. A. Hepburn-Ruston, was a high-pressure business promoter and rabid anti-Communist who, after leaving Audrey's mother, joined Sir Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts (British Union of Fascists). Audrey's earliest companions were her two older half brothers, with whom she spent many hours in tomboy comradeship, climbing trees and racing across the green fields of their Belgian estate. Unlike most little girls, she did not care for dolls. "They never seemed real to me," she says. She preferred instead the company of dogs, cats, rabbits and other animals with as much vitality as herself. In her quiet moments, she would dress up in the make-believe that others kept for their dolls, and wherever a bush or a tree or a spare piece of furniture formed a secret corner, she would build herself an imaginary castle and sit happily for hours drawing pictures or dreaming dreams.