Audrey Hepburn in Marbella: The Hidden Drama of the Actress During Her Happy Vacation

There are over a thousand books about Audrey Hepburn. But one was missing. The official one. The authorized biography of the legendary actress and fashion icon, 'Audrey Intimate,' has just been released in Spain more than three decades after her death. It is authored in her name by her "best friend," her own son Sean Hepburn Ferrer, who has chosen to share lesser-known aspects of his mother. Such as her status as a young survivor of the Nazis, which haunted her all her life; her struggles with infertility, and her allergy to Hollywood pretense. This led her to reside in Europe, settling in Switzerland, but swapping Swiss punctuality for lost hours in Marbella. The biography reveals that the peace the actress sought on the Costa del Sol, which filled hundreds of newspaper and magazine pages, was also an attempt to save the unsavable: her marriage to fellow actor Mel Ferrer, who does not come off well in the eyes of his own son.

"The day my mother caught me tiptoeing past my father's office and speaking softly to avoid one of his outbursts was when she realized she had endured too much. It mortified her to think that I was afraid of my own father. I am convinced that was the moment she decided to leave him," Sean Hepburn Ferrer candidly recounts in these official memoirs, co-written with journalist Wendy Holden. The couple officially separated in 1968, but the final stage coincided with the time they bought a little plot to build a house, Santa Catalina, in Marbella. In an idyllic, natural space by the sea that would soon be dubbed the Golden Mile. Among other things, because Audrey Hepburn had a house there since 1964.

The eldest son of the star of 'Sabrina' and 'Roman Holiday' does not elaborate much in the book about those seasons on the Costa del Sol, although he reveals previously unknown details. Like how his parents "spoke to us in Spanish when we were in Marbella" and that, more than the summers, the couple of actors intended to spend there the "winters" to escape the Swiss cold. The paradox of these memoirs is that Sean Hepburn Ferrer does not discuss the characters who usually surrounded Audrey and Mel in Marbella. Such as Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, who showed them the glamorous estate next to the Marbella Club hotel where they built their house; Countess of Romanones and former CIA spy, the American Aline Griffith, with whom the actress went to the bullfights at the Malaga Fair, and especially, the Rubinsteins, Arthur and Aniela, with whom they shared teatime and evenings with the legendary musician at the piano.

Thus, the authorized biography reveals that her great friend in Malaga was another Hollywood actress, Deborah Kerr, who "ended up living not far from my mother in Switzerland and, later, in Marbella, right next to where my parents built a beautiful beach house." Both shared a youth marked by World War II and an entry into "acting by chance," "shared experiences" that "helped them bond and support each other throughout their lives," states Audrey's son, who even quotes his mother's words about their friendship: "I couldn't say she was the best friend of my life. But, in a sense, maybe she was." They didn't always see each other, but paraphrasing one of Deborah's great movies, both professed loyalty from here to eternity.

In 'Hepburn Intimate,' the biographer not only offers his mother's perspective in the first person but also attempts to debunk some urban legends about the actress that are entrenched like a bad movie in collective memory. Thus, he denies that her thinness was due to any eating disorder, clarifies that she was not Katherine Hepburn's sister nor was she Marilyn Monroe's best friend, or that she married three times. In reality, she did it twice, with Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti and, previously, with her father, Mel Ferrer. The son of both actors acknowledges that his mother's success was inversely proportional to that of his father, and while he elaborates on his mother's films, such as 'My Fair Lady' or 'Charade,' shot during those years of temporary residence in Marbella, he lightly touches on his father's films, just as he did as a child outside his office.

In fact, he dismisses his father's attempt to become a director by defining that work as "a low-budget bullfighting musical" without giving the title. That movie was Spanish and was none other than 'Cabriola' (1965), shot in Marbella and Fuengirola, and starring the great star of the era: Marisol from Malaga. For Hollywood money, the film might seem like a B series, but not for our country, although its problem was that this production stretched the myth of its child star protagonist too far.

Pepa Flores herself also did not have fond memories of Mel Ferrer. "He always kept his distance, which his wife was the complete opposite of," recounted the then young protagonist. This difference that everyone noticed, also began to be evident to the protagonist of 'The Nun's Story' and 'Wait Until Dark'. "The main problem was that the neurotic perfectionist who was my father wanted to focus on acting, directing, and producing (...), while he acted as a 'bully' regarding all the contractual decisions of her films," reveals Sean, who carries in the order of his own surnames his maternal preference over his paternal: Hepburn Ferrer.

The last visit of Audrey to Santa Catalina was in 1967. By then, the Hepburn-Ferrer marriage was already broken, but the couple continued to be seen together. Particularly at the bullfights, which made the front page of SUR. Not the bulls or the poster with El Viti, Mondeño, and El Cordobés, but the couple under the headline "Famous on the Coast." She with large black nerd glasses, he with his in hand. Both keenly observing the spectacle. But now we know from 'Audrey Intimate' that the thrust was inward.