Intimate Audrey: The Authorized Biography

Ferrer follows his bestselling 2005 photo book Audrey Hepburn: An Elegant Spirit with a deeper exploration of his mother’s life, coauthored with Holden (The Teacher of Auschwitz). When Audrey was six, her father abandoned her and her mother, and that absence, Ferrer writes, “made her insecure for life, shaping almost every decision she made, especially when it came to men.” At 25, she married actor and director Mel Ferrer (her first marriage, his fourth). After two devastating miscarriages, she gave birth to Sean in 1960 at age 31. Ferrer suggests that his father didn’t want more children (he had four already), and his actions toward his pregnant wife seemed aimed “to prevent her from keeping the infants she was carrying.” He writes that his mother stayed in the marriage longer than she should have, hoping to “heal the hurt of my father’s emotional hunger.” Hepburn’s second marriage, to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, produced a second son, Luca, in 1970. Her happiest relationship was with Robert Wolders (whom Ferrer describes as “adorable but a doormat”) from 1980 until her death in 1993.