Audrey Hepburn — The Tragic Fate of Her 2 Sons
Audrey Hepburn — The Tragic Fate of Her 2 Sons
She had one Oscar, one BAFTA, one Tony, one Emmy, one Grammy, and a Presidential Medal of Freedom. She wore Givveni like it was invented for her specifically because it was she was the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema. According to the American Film Institute, she fed tulip bulbs to survive a war, lost multiple pregnancies to heartbreak and bad luck, gave the best years of her career away to motherhood without a second thought, and spent the last chapter of her life, traveling to the
most desperate corners of the earth to look children in the face and tell them they mattered. And when she died, she said the two things she was proudest of were not breakfast at Tiffany’s, not Roman Holiday, not the dresses, not the cigarette holder, not the little black dress that became the single most imitated outfit in fashion history.
She said it was her boys, two sons, one from each marriage. One who grew up watching his mother step back from the most famous career in Hollywood because she decided he was more important. one who grew up not even knowing his mother was famous because she hid it from him so well that it genuinely worked.
Two men who then found each other, built something together in her name, and then spent the better part of a decade suing each other over it. This is not a simple story. It is not a tragedy in the classical sense, though it has tragedy folded through it. It is not a Hollywood fable with a clean ending, though it has beauty in it.
It is the story of what it actually cost to be Audrey Heppern’s son and what those two sons did with the debt. If you’re enjoying this deep dive into the story, hit the subscribe button and let us know in the comments from where in the world you are watching from today. The woman they called mom to understand what it meant to grow up as a child of Audrey Heppern.
You have to understand what Audrey Hepburn actually was. Not the icon, not the poster, not the Xiani silhouette standing in a cigarette holder of legend, the actual woman behind it. And the actual woman is in some ways more remarkable than the icon and considerably darker. Audrey Kathleen Hepburn was born on May 4th, 1929 in Brussels, Belgium.
Her mother was a Dutch baroness named Ella Van Heamstra, a woman of formidable will and occasionally withering cander who would later describe her son-in-law with the memorable phrase frog-faced delinquent with the spindly legs. Her father was a British banker named Joseph Victor Anthony Hepburn Rustin and he was by every account the first wound in a life that collected wounds quietly and kept moving.
When Audrey was 6 years old, her father left. He did not leave in a dramatic way. He did not die or disappear in a crisis. He simply walked out of the family home, leaving behind a six-year-old girl who adored him completely and would spend the rest of her life trying to outrun the particular fear his departure installed in her. Shawn Heepburn Ferrer, her eldest son, said in a 2020 interview that she never got over the loss of her father.
Not the loss to death, he was alive. She eventually found him decades later living in Dublin and flew to Ireland to see him. But even then, he told Sky News she could not bring herself to ask why he left. They saw each other. They were cordial. The question that had shaped her entire emotional life stayed unasked. She carried the wound quietly.
That was how she did things. Then the war came. When the German occupation began in the Netherlands in 1940, Audrey was 10 years old and living in Arnham with her mother. What followed was 5 years of occupation that left marks on her that never fully healed. The family hid. They moved between sellers and darkness.
Her uncle was executed by the Nazis. One of her brothers was deported to a German labor camp. Another went into hiding. Her mother, who had initially held certain sympathies with the occupiers, a position she abandoned in horror as the reality of the regime became clear, eventually became part of the underground, and Audrey nearly starved to death.
This is not a metaphor. By the end of the war, she was, in Luca’s words, very close to death. She had survived on tulip bulbs and nettles and water drunk in large quantities to fill a stomach that had nothing in it. The starvation affected her health permanently. It suppressed her growth. It gave her a body that the fashion world would later call ethereal and elegant without knowing or much caring that it was the residue of genuine famine.
When the war ended and UNICEF trucks rolled into the Netherlands with food and medicine and the basic materials of survival, a teenage Audrey Hepern was among the children who received that aid. She never forgot it. 40 years later when UNICEF asked her to serve as a goodwill ambassador, she said yes without hesitation.
She traveled to Ethiopia, to Somalia, to Bangladesh, to Vietnam, to Honduras, to the most harrowing places on earth. She saw conditions that brought her back in some fundamental way to those sellers in Arnham. And she went back again and again until her body would not let her. But that is later. First, there was the matter of becoming Audrey Hepburn.
She had wanted to be a ballerina. She trained seriously, rigorously, and with a devotion that the war had interrupted but not extinguished. When she arrived in Amsterdam after liberation, she studied with serious teachers. She was talented, but the starvation had done what it does. It had disrupted her development in ways that no amount of talent could entirely compensate for.
She was told she did not have the physique or the stamina to become a principal dancer. So, she turned to acting. The trajectory that followed was so rapid and so total that it still reads as slightly unbelievable. She was spotted in the lobby of a hotel by the French novelist Colette, who decided on the spot that she had found the only possible actress to play Gigi on Broadway.
She got the part. She did Broadway. Hollywood noticed. She was cast in Roman Holiday alongside Gregory Pek, won the Academy Award for it at the age of 24 and became within approximately 18 months of anyone knowing her name, one of the most famous women in the world. And then she met Mel Ferrer and everything got complicated.
The first marriage and the son who came from it. Mel Ferrer was 12 years older than Audrey. He was an actor, a director, a man of the theater with a certain brooding quality that read his depth and occasionally was. He had been married three times before. He was introduced to Audrey at a party hosted by Gregory Peek in 1953, and she later described the first meeting with characteristic gentleness.
She remembered thinking he was very serious and that he did not smile. They found each other through work, as people in the industry often do. He sent her the script for a play called On Dean, a fantasy about a water nymph who falls in love with a human knight. She agreed to do it. He directed. She acted.
She won the Tony Award for the performance. The same week, she had won the Oscar for Roman Holiday, making her one of the handful of performers in history to win both in the same year. It was the most decorated seven days in the career of a 24year-old woman. And in the middle of all of it, she and Mel Ferrer fell in love.
They married on September 25th, 1954 in a small chapel in Switzerland, deliberately hidden from the press in a tiny chapel with a wedding breakfast. After Audrey described it, no photographers, no circus. She was 25 years old and very much in love and very much wanted a family of her own. What followed was the opposite of what she wanted for several years.
The miscarriages began almost immediately. The first came in March 1955. The second came later at 6 months. A third followed during the filming of The Unforgiven in 1959 after she broke her back falling from a horse onto a rock on a rocky New Mexico set. The fall shattered several vertebrae.
The miscarriage that followed was said to have been induced by the combined trauma of the physical injury and the psychological stress of what she had been through. She spent weeks in the hospital. Mel, by some accounts, had the film’s fawn brought to her room as a pet to cheer her up, which is either very sweet or a slightly bewildering gesture, depending on your frame of reference.
Shan Heepburn Ferrer spoke about those years in a 2020 interview with Sky News with a quality of feeling that made clear he had spent decades thinking about what they cost his mother. “The first miscarriage is a tragedy,” he said. And the second one is not just another tragedy, but it gets you so many more miles away from thinking that you’ll ever be able to have a child.
The medical explanations, incompetent cervix, stress related complications were not available to them at the time. Nobody knew. People just kept losing pregnancies and being told to keep moving, which is what Audrey did because it was what she knew how to do. And then on July 17th, 1960 in Bergenstock Lucern, Switzerland, Shaun Heern arrived.
Audrey wrote to her friend, Sir Felix Almer, in the immediate aftermath. Shawn is truly a dream, and I find it hard to believe he is really ours to keep. He was theirs to keep. What is perhaps less immediately obvious from the outside is what Audrey Heper did next. She was at this point one of the most bankable stars in Hollywood. Roman Holiday had made her.
Sabrina had deepened it. The nun’s story had confirmed she was not just a face. Breakfast at Tiffany’s was about to happen. She was at the peak of a career that any actress in the world would have protected and expanded at all costs. She stepped back, not entirely, not forever, but significantly, deliberately, with full awareness of what she was choosing.
She turned down roles. She restructured her schedule around Shaun’s needs. She did fewer films. She was, by every account, from people who knew the family genuinely and fully present when she was home. Her son would later describe a mother who was warm and hands-on and physically there in ways that the publicity machine around her never quite captured. She came to school events.
She made meals. She took him to the park. She was not simply an occasional glamorous visitor in her own home. Shawn grew up in Europe, moving between Switzerland, Italy, and Spain as his parents’ lives and projects demanded. He became fluent in five languages: English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese, which is the kind of detail that tells you a great deal about the kind of childhood he had.
It was international, it was mobile, and it was in the way that is particular to the children of very famous people, both privileged and fundamentally strange. What was happening around the edges of that childhood, however, was less idyllic. The marriage to Mel Ferrer was not a happy one. It was complicated and in many ways unequal.
Ferrer was controlling or at least gave that impression. The press had been writing about his Sphingalike influence on Audrey for years, and she had given interviews defending him and laughing off the descriptions, which is precisely the thing someone does when they are partly aware the descriptions are accurate.
Her mother, the Baroness, who called him a frog-faced delinquent, never accepted him. The fact that he had been married three times before, was not reassuring to anyone who loved Audrey. There were affairs on both sides. Audrey was rumored to have become romantically involved with Robert Anderson, the screenwriter on The Nun story, as she was navigating rumors of Farah’s own infidelities.
She later had what was described as a deep emotional connection with her Two for the Road co-star Albert Finny, a film that director Stanley Donan said was the period in which he had seen her freer and happier than at any other point in their working relationship, which is a significant thing for a director to observe about a woman filming on the brink of her own divorce.
Farah and Heburn separated in 1967 and divorced in 1968. Shawn was 7 years old. He would later say that his parents had never argued in front of him, which is a detail that sounds kind and considerate on the surface and slightly heartbreaking just underneath because it means a child growing up knowing something was wrong without quite being able to name it.
Mel Farah went on to marry and live his own life. He died in 2008 at the age of 90. Audrey, by her son’s account, spoke to her ex-husband only twice in the remainder of her life after the divorce, which is not unusual for divorced people, but is perhaps somewhat unusual for people who share a child. Shawn Hepern for Rare would go on to build a life that straddled the world his mother had inhabited and the world beyond it.
He worked in film, in development, production, and marketing. He directed a documentary in 2001. He produced. He built a career in the industry without quite being swallowed by it. He married three times. First to Ila Flanigan, with whom he had his daughter Emma, born in 1994, the year after Audrey died, then to Giovana Ferrer, with whom he had sons Gregorio and Santiago, and then to Karen Ferrer, whom he married later and is still with.
He is fluent in five languages. Just like his mother, he became in many ways the public face of her legacy. The one who gave interviews, who gave speeches, who spoke movingly about what she had meant and what she had cost herself to be what she was. But the relationship between Shan Heping Ferrer and his mother’s legacy would eventually become considerably more complicated than a son honoring a parents memory because there was also the charity and the lawsuit and the brother and the brother has his own story entirely. The second marriage and
the boy who didn’t know Audrey met Andrea Doy in the summer of 1968 approximately one year after separating from Mel Ferrer on a Mediterranean cruise. He was Italian. He was a psychiatrist. He was 9 years younger than her. Handsome, warm, and apparently utterly charming in the way that certain Italian men can be when they are trying.
She had just ended a 14-year marriage. She was 39 years old. She was tired and bruised and ready, or so she thought, for something genuinely different. They married on January 18th, 1969, in a simple civil ceremony in Mores, Switzerland. Audrey later said she believed she would have more children and possibly stop working entirely.
She wanted the domestic life she had always wanted. She moved to Rome where Die lived and practiced medicine. She made herself into something approximating a Roman housewife which given that she was Audrey Hepburn was a somewhat extraordinary thing to attempt. 6 months into the marriage she was pregnant. She rested carefully.
She was cautious in ways she had not always been before. She painted during the months of enforced stillness. On February 8th, 1970, Luca Andrea Doi was born by Cesareian section in Lausan, Switzerland. He was healthy. Audrey was by all accounts overwhelmed with a quiet kind of gratitude. What Luca did not know for a significant portion of his childhood was that his mother was famous.
This sounds implausible. It is in fact one of the more remarkable achievements of Audrey Hepern’s life. and she pulled it off with the same elegant determination she brought to everything else. She kept him away from the industry. She did not bring him to premieres or press events or anywhere the cameras gathered. She was at home in Rome simply his mother.
She picked him up from school herself. She cooked. She was present. She created in the middle of a city she was not from a domestic universe that felt genuinely ordinary to the small person growing up inside it. Luca Dotty described this years later with a mixture of humor and genuine emotion.
To me, my mother was Audrey Doy. He told people, “I never realized she was Audrey Hepburn. I didn’t know she was a movie star. She always looked at my father like he was the center of attention. She was a simple country girl. He found out the truth while watching television.” The film was Love in the Afternoon, a 1957 Billy Wilder comedy in which his mother kissed Gary Cooper.
He was watching it at home. He looked at the screen, he looked at his mother, he looked at the screen again, and something clicked into place that had apparently not been in place before. She was a simple country girl. He had said she had convinced her own child of this which means she had in some fundamental way convinced herself of it too or at least performed it so completely that the performance became real within those walls.
What was happening on the other side of those walls was considerably less simple. Andrea Di was by the evidence available an enthusiastically and publicly unfaithful husband. The documentary Audrey, made in 2020, includes research suggesting that he was photographed with approximately 200 different women during the course of the marriage.
The family’s own maid eventually told Audrey that Doie would bring women home while she was traveling. Heburn had had her suspicions. The maid confirmed them. This was, by most reckonings, not the domestic paradise Audrey had moved to Rome to find. She stayed for 13 years. She stayed in large measure for Luca. She had watched the impact of her divorce from Mel Ferrer on Shawn and she was not prepared to do that to another child if there was any way to avoid it.
She also by some accounts had a genuine affection for Doie that could not simply be switched off because he had behaved badly which is one of the less convenient truths about love. She had one more miscarriage during the Doy years in 1974 her last. The marriage ended in 1982. Luca was 12 years old. Shawn later described Andrea Doy as a fantastic stepfather in his better moments.
Fun, engaged, genuinely present with both boys when he was present at all. But the infidelities had corroded the marriage beyond repair. Audrey finally decided that both Luca and Shawn were old enough to manage life with a single mother, which is a very specific calculus, and walked away. Andrea Doy died in October 2007 from complications following a colonoscopy.
He was 69 years old. After the divorce from Doy, Audrey found something she had not quite found in either marriage. She found Robert Walders. Walders was a Dutch actor, quiet and devoted and private in ways that suited her completely. They were not married. They did not need to be. They spent 11 years together, traveling, living, and eventually, as her health declined, sitting with the knowledge that the time they had was finite.
He was beside her when she received the diagnosis that would kill her. He was beside her when she traveled to Somalia and Sudan and all the places she was going, even as her body was beginning to fail. He was there at the end. If you find the story engaging, please take a moment to subscribe and enable notifications.
It helps us continue producing in-depth content like this. The UNICEF years. What she did while they were growing up. One of the things it means to be Audrey Heppern’s son is that your mother’s absence from your daily life when it came was not because she was making movies. It was because she was in Ethiopia watching children die of famine or in Sudan documenting a refugee crisis or in Vietnam talking to children in hospitals or in Honduras looking at conditions in villages so remote and so desperate that most famous people would have read the briefing
document and sent a check instead. She had become a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 1988. She was 58 years old. She had been retired from acting more or less for a decade. She had found that there was a version of public life that she could engage with, not as a performer, but as a witness, and she threw herself into it with the same complete commitment she had brought to everything else.
Both Shawn and Luca have spoken about watching their mother do this work and what it meant to them. Shawn accompanied her on some of the missions. He has described standing beside her in conditions of extreme poverty and deprivation and watching her engage with children with a directness and a warmth that had nothing to do with celebrity and everything to do with the woman he had grown up with.
The same woman who picked up Luca from school and made pasta and was at home simply his mother. Luca in a 2021 interview described the moment the 2020 book Warrior Audrey Hepburn changed his understanding of what she had actually done. He said she had always told them stories about what she witnessed on these missions, but that they were always sugarcoated.
The book with its research and firsthand accounts showed him the full scale of what she had walked into willingly again and again as her health was declining and the work was becoming physically harder to sustain. She had been supported by UNICEF as a child in the Netherlands. She spent the last years of her life paying that debt.
The symmetry of it was not lost on her. She said so explicitly in multiple interviews. She said she owed them everything. She was trying to give some of it back. What her sons understood watching this was that their mother was not simply generous. She was driven. There was something in her.
The six-year-old whose father left, the 10-year-old eating tulip bulbs, the girl who was told she would never dance that had converted into a kind of relentless purposefulness. She did not do things halfway. She did not send a check. She got on the plane. Both of them would eventually try to do the same with complicated results.
The diagnosis, the final Christmas, and the goodbye. In 1992, Audrey began to lose weight in ways that alarmed the people around her. She was already slender. The new thinness was different. There was pain in her abdomen. She went to Cedar Sai Medical Center in Los Angeles where the diagnosis came.
cancer of the appendix, specifically a rare form called pseudomixoma paratoni which had spread. She was given three months. Robert Walders was with her when she received the news. He later said she was not afraid of dying but was frightened of the pain that was coming. Her one request was to go home. She had spent the last chapter of her life in her house in Toshana, Switzerland, a farmhouse called La Zebla, which translates roughly as the peaceful one.
She wanted to be there. She wanted one last Christmas with her children and her partner and the life she had built. She got it. Woulder said later that she told him it was the most beautiful Christmas she had ever had. On January 20th, 1993, Audrey Hepburn died in her sleep at Lee Zebla. She was 63 years old.
Shawn was 32. Luca was 22. Her funeral was held 4 days later at the village church of Tokenaz. The same pastor who had married her and Mel Faraher 39 years earlier and who had baptized Shawn in 1960 presided. Gregory Peek who had introduced her to Mel Faraher and had been her friend for 40 years recorded a tribute in which he read the poem Unending Love by Rabindrren Tagore and by the accounts of everyone who heard it he wept through most of it.
Both ex-husbands attended Mel Farer came. Andrea Doi came. Hubert Dejivveni who had been her designer and her friend for 40 years was there. Roger Moore, Alan Dalon, executives from UNICEF. Elizabeth Taylor sent flowers. Audrey was buried at the Tokina cemetery in the village where she had lived the last years of her life, which was exactly where she had wanted to be.
Her estate was valued at approximately $55 million. She left it primarily to her two sons with equal rights to her name, her likeness, her film contracts, and the royalties from everything she had made. She left her jewels to her close family and friends. She left Robert Walders something. She left everything with a kind of quiet orderliness that matched the way she had lived her life.
And then her two sons, who had both loved her and both lost her, had to figure out what to do with what she left behind. Shawn, the son who carried her forward. Shawn Heppern Faraher was 32 years old when his mother died and he responded with what can only be described as urgency. Within a year of her death, he had founded a charity.
He called it Hollywood for children and it was eventually renamed the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. He organized exhibitions of his mother’s personal memorabilia, her dresses, her photographs, her personal effects, and took them on world tour, raising money for the humanitarian programs she had championed.
He did it in cooperation with his half-brother, Luca, and with Robert Walders, who had been his mother’s partner and who continued his relationship with the family after her death. It was a natural thing to do. It was also if you look at it a certain way the thing that a person does when they are not entirely sure what else to do with grief.
You make something you create a structure around the loss. You give people a way to come and see what she was and in the looking you feel like she is slightly less gone. Shawn served as chairman of the fund for years. He did speaking engagements. He wrote a biography of his mother published in 2003, Audrey Hepern, an elegant spirit, which drew on personal letters and family photographs and his own memories of the woman she had been at home.
It is a loving book, careful in its reverence. He described her as a wonderful package of imperfections, which is perhaps the most honest and most generous way anyone has described a parent who has been turned into an icon. He also had a career. He produced. He worked on documentaries. He was present in the industry without being consumed by it, which is a balance his mother would have recognized and approved of.
He had three children. Emma, his daughter, by his first wife, Leela Flanigan, was born in 1994, the year after Audrey died. She grew up looking so much like her grandmother, that photographs of the two of them, placed side by side, make people stop and look again. Emma became a model. She worked with Jivvoni, Tiffany’s Dior.
She appeared on the cover of Harper’s Bizaarre. She became a UNICEF ambassador herself, the same role her grandmother had held, which is a form of inheritance that has nothing to do with money. She helped produce the 2020 documentary Audrey, directed by Helena Conn, which brought her grandmother’s voice and life to a new generation.
Shaun’s sons, Gregorio and Santiago, born in his second marriage, have lived quieter lives. His third marriage to Karan Ferrer brought two stepchildren into the family as well. He is by various accounts a man who has built something real and lasting from the raw material of an extraordinary inheritance and an equally extraordinary loss.
But the question of who controlled that inheritance literally, legally, financially eventually became very complicated indeed. Luca, the boy who didn’t know and what he did when he found out. Luca Daddy grew up in Rome believing his mother was a simple country girl from the Netherlands who made pasta really well and always picked him up from school.
He found out the truth from a television. He processed it with the particular flexibility of a child who trusts his mother completely, which is to say he absorbed the new information into the existing framework of who she was rather than replacing it. She was still his mother. She was also apparently a famous actress.
These two facts coexisted. He was 12 when his parents divorced, 22 when she died, and for the years between those two events, he had watched a woman who was visibly declining in health continue to get on planes to places most people would not voluntarily visit to do work that was clearly costing her something physically because she felt it was necessary.
In his 2021 interview, Lucas spoke about the moment he understood the full scale of what she had done during those UNICEF years. He said that he had always known the surface, the missions, the visits, the headlines, but he had not understood until reading a later biography that stripped away the sugar coating, what she had actually witnessed and what it had taken out of her.
He said that reading it changed how he saw her, that he fell in love with her again in a different way. When he understood the cost, he became a graphic designer. He settled in Rome, the city he had grown up in, with his wife, Dmitila Berusi, also a graphic designer and illustrator, and their daughters. He is by all accounts genuinely private.
He does not appear on red carpets. He does not seek attention. He gives occasional interviews about his mother thoughtfully and with care, but he does not make himself available to the press in the way that a person angling for a public profile would. He wrote books, not about himself, about her. Audrey in Rome, published in 2013, documented the city she had made her home and the parts of herself she had found there.
Audrey at Home, published in 2015, was something more intimate still, a memoir organized around her cooking, her recipes, her domestic life as his mother had actually lived it. The woman who made pasta and picked him up from school and looked at his father like he was the center of attention, the simple country girl.
He gave the public the private Audrey, the one behind the icon, and in doing so gave something away about himself too, about how he had experienced her, about what he held most dear from those years. He eventually became chairman of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund, taking over from Shawn in 2012.
He has spoken about the work with the particular combination of practicality and genuine belief that suggests the motivation is real rather than performative. He does not want his mother to be remembered as an image. He wants her to be remembered for what she actually did. And what she actually did was, he has argued, more important than any of the films.
He and his daughters remain largely out of the public eye. His children are photographed occasionally, shared on Instagram on rare occasions. They live, as far as anyone can tell, like people who know they have an extraordinary grandmother and have decided that the best way to honor her is to live well and quietly and not make it about the cameras.
Which is, when you think about it, exactly what Audrey would have wanted, the feud, when two sons go to court over their mother. Here is where the story becomes considerably less tidy. In 2013, approximately 20 years after Audrey Hepburn died, things between Shawn and Luca began to deteriorate over the charity they had founded together.
The details are complex and not entirely flattering to anyone involved, which is to say they are very human. Shawn, who had originally founded the charity and had served as its chairman for years before handing the role to Luca, began to dispute how the fund was using his mother’s image. He wanted the charity to either pay licensing fees for the use of Audrey’s name and likeness or to donate a portion of its proceeds to a charity of his choosing.
He wanted, in other words, some control over how her image was being deployed. He took over the fund’s website and email accounts at some point during this dispute without the agreement of the charity’s board. The charity, now under Luca’s chairmanship, responded by suing Shawn. The lawsuit alleged that he was interfering with the charity’s fundraising operations and that his actions could cause the fund to dissolve if it could not meet its obligations.
Shawn responded by suing the charity itself. This time for trademark infringement, claiming the fund no longer had the right to use Audrey’s name or likeness without his consent. There was a period in which two brothers were suing each other and a charity in various configurations over the name and face of their dead mother.
a woman who had spent the last years of her life in war zones and famine zones trying to help other people’s children. The courts eventually sided in significant ways with Shawn. In 2019, a judge ruled that the charity could not utilize Audrey Hepburn’s image without the consent of both sons. Since both sons had equal rights to her estate and Shawn was withholding consent, this created a significant operational problem for the fund.
It was by 2017 already resolved enough that the brothers had signed an agreement detailing which of their mother’s personal belongings would go to each of them, finally settling what had apparently been left ambiguous in Audrey’s will. The agreement ended the active legal hostilities, at least publicly. Whether it ended the underlying tension between the two men is something only they know.
What is striking looking at this dispute is how human it is. Two people who loved the same woman and disagreed eventually and profoundly about who should control how she is remembered. These are not villains. These are sons. Sons who lost their mother young. Luca was 22. And who have spent the subsequent decades trying to figure out what loyalty to her actually requires.
And who found, as siblings often do, that they had different answers. The broader context matters. Audrey’s estate was worth $55 million at the time of her death. Her name and likeness have generated revenue far beyond that in the decades since. The Jiven collaboration alone ensured that her image remains commercially valuable in ways that her sons are legally empowered to control.
When that much is at stake and when grief is in the room alongside it, conflict is not surprising. It is almost inevitable. What remains on the other side of all of it is that both men are still working in her name. The Audrey Heppern Children’s Fund continues to exist. Both sons supported in their respective ways.
Emma Ferrer, Shaun’s daughter, carries on the UNICEF work. Luca’s daughters are being raised with an understanding of what their grandmother stood for that has nothing to do with the movie posters. What they carry. There is a photograph of Audrey Hepburn that was taken in 1990 during one of her UNICEF missions to Somalia. She is 61 years old.
She is sitting with a child in her arms. The child is malnourished and frightened. She is holding him with the complete unperformed attention of someone who is actually present in the room, not performing for a camera, not constructing an image. She looks like someone who has done this before and will do it again and knows exactly what it costs and has decided it does not matter. Her sons know this photograph.
They have seen it many times. They have talked about it in interviews with the careful specificity of people who understand that the image contains something true. What they carry both of them is the knowledge of who she actually was. Not the poster, not the cigarette holder, not the little black dress, but the woman who ate tulip bulbs to survive and then went back 50 years later to every place where people were eating tulip bulbs because she understood from the inside what that meant. Shawn has said publicly that the
bestkept secret about his mother was that she was sad, that the perpetual elegance, the composure, the grace covered something underneath that the cameras never quite caught. His daughter Emma said the same thing in the 2020 documentary. The bestkept secret about Audrey was that she was sad. It’s a startling thing to say about a woman so associated with warmth and lightness.
But grief has a way of being a persistent presence in the background of a person’s face, even when the face is smiling if you know where to look. Luca has said that he wishes people understood that the humanitarian work was not separate from who she was, that it was the most essential expression of it.
The films were how the world knew her. The UNICEF missions were how she knew herself. He grew up watching the second version of his mother, the one behind the icon. And he thinks the second version was more important. Both of them are right. The two versions were the same person. The girl who survived the war and the woman who went back to the wars was the same person who made pasta in Rome and who said Shawn was a dream too good to believe was really theirs to keep.
The wholeness of her is what her sons are still trying to explain, still trying to honor, still sometimes arguing about how to protect. She would probably find this very annoying and also completely understandable who they became. Shan Heepburn Farre is 64 years old. He lives in the United States with his wife Karen.
He has three children and two stepchildren. He is a film producer, an author, a public advocate for his mother’s legacy, and someone who has spent 30 years explaining Audrey Hepburn to a world that thought it already knew her. He writes, he speaks, he produces. He named his daughter Emma who looks exactly like his mother and who has gone on to model for Xivon Xi, the same fashion house that defined his mother’s aesthetic and to work for UNICEF and to help bring the 2020 documentary to an audience that received it with the particular emotion of people
encountering something they thought they knew and discovering they didn’t. He has said that he wants people to remember his mother for her talent which is often overlooked because of her face. He has said that she deserved to be taken seriously as an actress that the depth she brought to her work was real and considered and earned and that the world’s tendency to see her primarily as beautiful was always somewhat beside the point which is exactly the thing a son would say who had watched his mother work and knew what it cost her. Luca Di
is 55 years old. He lives in Rome, the city his mother chose and in which he grew up with his wife and daughters. He designs. He has written three books about his mother. He chairs the foundation that carries her name. He does not give many interviews, but the ones he gives are careful and substantive and suggest a man who has thought seriously about what it means to carry a legacy without being consumed by it.
He has said that as a child he did not realize his mother was an icon until after her death. that while she was alive, she was simply his mother and that this is the thing he is most grateful for. That she gave him that the ordinary thing, the cooking and the school pickups and the sense that at home she was just Audrey Doy who happened to also have once been someone on television kissing Gary Cooper.
He carries the simpler, quieter version of her and he has decided that version is the one worth protecting. The end and what comes after. Audrey Hepern is buried at the Tokana Cemetery in the village she chose near the farmhouse called Lee Zebla. Both her ex-husbands died after her. Die in 2007, Ferrer in 2008.
Robert Walders who was with her until the end died in 2018. The grandchildren are growing up. Emma models and advocates. The others live their private lives. The charity continues. The books are still being bought. The films are still being watched. Breakfast at Tiffany’s is still being quoted by people who could not tell you a single thing about what the movie is actually about.
And Roman Holiday is still being watched by people who find every time that she is more interesting and funnier and more alive than they expected. and her two sons, the one who grew up knowing exactly who she was, and the one who did not find out until he saw her on television kissing Gary Cooper, are both still here, still carrying her, still sometimes in conflict about what it means to do that correctly.
She wanted to be a mother more than anything else. She said so repeatedly in interviews and in letters and in the specific choices she made about her career that cost her roles she might otherwise have had. She stepped back for Shawn. She stepped back for Luca. She left Hollywood and went to Rome and made pasta and picked children up from school because that was the thing she had decided mattered most.
And it worked in the sense that it always does and never quite does. Both boys loved her. Both boys lost her at ages that were too young. Both boys have spent the decades since trying in their different ways to keep her present in a world that has decided she was an image when she was in fact a person.
She was a person who ate tulip bulbs and became a ballerina and then couldn’t and became an actress instead and then became famous beyond all reasonable expectation and then became a mother and then a humanitarian and then a woman in the last years of her life sitting on the ground in Somalia holding a child that wasn’t hers.
Two boys, two different fathers, two different childhoods, one in Switzerland, one in Rome. Two different ways of carrying the same weight forward into the world. They are still figuring it out. She would want them to. She would probably also want them to stop suing each other, but then she was never entirely naive about the complications of love.
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