'How I wish Audrey could have met her granddaughter': Hepburn's son tells of the deep sorrow that his mother didn't live to see the girl who looks so startlingly like her

When Emma Ferrer appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar magazine last September, few people would have instantly recognised her, and yet the accompanying article generated a staggering 500 million hits online. 

Despite Emma growing up aware of the legacy of her grandmother – Audrey Hepburn, from whom she inherited her dark, soulful eyes and a graceful demeanour – the 20-year-old art student was still unprepared for the onslaught of interest.

‘She said to me, “But Dad, I’ve done nothing to get all this attention”,’ says Emma’s father and Audrey’s eldest son, Sean Hepburn Ferrer. ‘And that’s when it hit her – the power of her grandmother and how people still feel connected to her after all this time.’

Sean with his parents, Audrey and Mel, as a child

Last year marked the 20th anniversary of Audrey Hepburn’s death, but interest in the beautiful British star – who dedicated her later life to championing the world’s poor – continues. 

‘Even now, we’re surprised by the reach of my mum,’ says Sean, 54, ‘so you can imagine our surprise at the interest in my daughter. We got calls from Hollywood companies wanting to do a reality show with her and we thought, “About what? We’re not a Hollywood family.” 

'While Emma understands the family history, she has her feet on the ground. My mum was the same. She didn’t write an autobiography because she used to say, “Who’d be interested? My life’s sort of boring.”’

Grounded Audrey Hepburn may have been, but boring she wasn’t. Behind the gloss of a successful Hollywood career, Audrey had navigated a difficult childhood, endured two divorces and suffered a history of miscarriages before having the children she so desperately wanted.

Audrey (left) in 1953 and her granddaughter Emma (right)

Sean, her son by her first husband, the actor Mel Ferrer, has been the keeper of his mother’s flame since her death at 63 in 1993 and recently took over the honorary chairmanship of UNICEF’s Audrey Hepburn Society, having run the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund for 20 years. Now he’s handing over the reins of the fund to his half-brother Luca. ‘I think she would be proud of us,’ says Sean.

When he was born in 1960, after Audrey had suffered two miscarriages, she declared it ‘the greatest joy, because that’s all I really wanted in the world’. She went on to film classics such as Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961) and My Fair Lady (1964), but once Sean started school, Audrey retreated to the family home in Switzerland to raise him.

‘She didn’t want the typical Hollywood lifestyle of juggling a career and leaving the kids at home with nannies,’ says Sean, ‘so she’d take me to buy socks and books and help me with my homework. 

Emma Ferrer Harper's BAZAAR cover August 2014

'She’d come and watch me in school plays and give me little pointers, saying, “Don’t try and learn your lines – it’s like a song where you learn the words by listening to it on the radio for a week. So read your lines last thing before you go to bed and first thing in the morning and you’ll know them” and it worked. How about that?’ he laughs. ‘Acting advice from Audrey Hepburn!’

His parents’ marriage was slowly deteriorating, however, and ended after 14 years. A year later, in 1969, Audrey married Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti and had Luca the following year. The family moved to Rome and even though Audrey loved being a ‘Roman mother’, staying at home and cooking pasta for her family, glimpses of her Hollywood life remained. 

‘Actors such as Peter Ustinov, Yul Brynner and Liza Minnelli would come for dinner, and Richard and Elizabeth,’ says Sean, meaning Burton and Taylor. ‘President Kennedy visited once, but that was in Switzerland and I remember the Secret Service men dressed in black swarming about the house. I don’t know if my mum and President Kennedy ever dated, but they were friends and there are some letters from him that she kept – sweet and innocent letters saying, “Saw you in the play the other night and you were fantastic.”’

She didn't want the typical Hollywood lifestyle of juggling a career and leaving the kids at home with nannies

Audrey and Andrea divorced in 1982, with Dotti’s wandering eye rumoured to be the cause. ‘He was a lot of fun as a stepdad,’ says Sean, ‘but he didn’t behave all that well to my mum.’ Audrey once said that she had, ‘hung on to both marriages as long as I could, for the children’s sake’, and her desire to give them an idyllic upbringing was perhaps rooted in her own childhood.

Her father, British diplomat Joseph Hepburn-Ruston, left home when she was six, leaving her, she later said, ‘very insecure about affection – and terribly grateful for it’. Audrey and her mother Ella van Heemstra lived in German-occupied Holland during WWII where they struggled to survive, which is said to be why she stayed so slight. 

'When the country was liberated, the malnourished Audrey was given a bar of chocolate by a British soldier and after devouring it, was violently ill. ‘It was the first chocolate she’d had in seven years and her body couldn’t process it,’ says Sean, ‘but she remembered eating it as an amazing moment.’

After the war, they moved to London and Audrey’s mother, a Dutch aristocrat by birth, took a job as a caretaker at a block of flats in Mayfair to pay for her daughter’s lessons at the Ballet Rambert. ‘Her mother was not emotionally encouraging,’ says Sean, ‘but she was the great driving force behind my mum’s initial success. She was a power woman at a time when there were no resources.’

Audrey later used that same drive in her work with UNICEF, spending six months a year in danger areas such as El Salvador and Somalia, and it was after returning from Somalia in 1992 that she started having agonising stomach cramps. A rare form of abdominal cancer was diagnosed and she died on 20 January 1993.

Two decades on, her granddaughter Emma (by Sean’s second wife Leila) might be following her into showbusiness. Although she’s at art school, ‘I think she also wants to act too,’ says Sean. ‘She was very funny as a kid and can do accents and imitations.’ 

Unfortunately, Audrey never got to see those funny moments. ‘She would have loved to have been a grandmother,’ says Sean, ‘but Emma was born 18 months after she passed away. Mum would have loved a girl to play with though. That would have made her very happy indeed.’