Audrey Hepburn’s Secret Life During World War II

In 1951, Audrey Hepburn sat for a screen test for Roman Holiday, her first major Hollywood film. While viewers today are struck by the actor's charm and presence, many are equally surprised by what she revealed in the footage—that as an adolescent, she participated in the Dutch Resistance during World War II.

Hepburn lived with her mother in Nazi-occupied Arnhem while attending ballet school in 1944. As the war raged on, German forces weakened Dutch citizens in part by cutting off food shipments. A severely malnourished 15-year-old Hepburn danced to raise money for the Dutch Underground, the network of resistance groups that sabotaged the Nazi occupation.

“What about the Germans? What did they do about it?” She was asked during the screen test. “They didn’t know about it,” the actor responded with a coy smile. 

Hepburn’s role in World War II at such a young age continues to be a source of fascination and even debate since her death in 1993. Robert Matzen, author of Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn and World War II, considers her youth to have been her secret weapon during the war.

“There's a bias of biographers in general, that when you're a child, you can't be taken seriously,” Matzen says. “You can't have serious experiences. You can't be entrusted with people's lives as a member of the Resistance because you're only a kid. But the Dutch knew that.” 

The Resistance, led by Arnhem doctor Hendrik Visser ’t Hooft, used that same preconceived notion to their advantage. The Germans overlooked that children could have been a threat to them in some way. As capable as Hepburn was as a performer, she was also valiant as a freedom fighter who, for instance, helped Allied airmen who had been shot down in the skies over the Netherlands on their way to or from Germany. 

Hepburn also helped deliver food and relay messages, including warnings about German troop movements and safe routes to avoid them. Schooled in England, Hepburn used her knowledge of English to communicate with British and U.S. airmen in need. The money she helped raise as a dancer was used for the 600 Jews hiding in Velp. 

She did all of this amid an increasingly bloody war across the Netherlands that included the Battle of Arnhem in 1944—the year Hepburn joined the Resistance—and the Hunger Winter, when German blockades caused widespread famine. The latter, Matzen adds, caused her to get life-threatening edema in her legs.

Enduring all of that and risking her life each time was part of what made Hepburn such a remarkable figure. But Hollywood seemed more interested in capitalizing off her winning charm, beauty and fashion than her experiences in the Resistance.

Following the end of the war in 1945, the industry wanted to celebrate happier subjects, explains Livi Edmonson, a media studies scholar at Georgia State University. There was a postwar romanticism effort to move past World War II-themed films, such as Mrs. Miniver and The Best Years of Our Lives toward more pleasing, glamorous images.

Hepburn rocketed to superstardom after the release of Roman Holiday in 1953, in which she played a princess who escapes her royal duties alongside actor Gregory Peck. Hepburn was presented as a Cinderella-esque figure in subsequent hits such as Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s. 

While Hepburn’s experiences in World War II were part of her introduction to Hollywood, those details weren't highly publicized at the time. However, her Resistance work made her uniquely suited to later serve as a Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), advocating for children’s rights. 

“When you survive a battle like the Battle of Arnhem, where German troops are using your neighborhood as a staging area, and then you go into Arnhem and you see the center of town destroyed, leveled by the Germans, that toughens you up,” Matzen says.

Hepburn’s partnership with UNICEF made sense because she recognized what it was like to be a child in the middle of a war zone. Beginning in 1988, two decades after stepping away from Hollywood and raising her two sons, Hepburn devoted the rest of her life to helping children in some of the most war-ravaged countries across the globe, including Ethiopia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Somalia. 

Still, even as the press followed Hepburn along her tireless travels to push for children's basic needs, including water and food, some journalists were still astonished by her pivot from Hollywood life. In 1989, Barbara Walters, for example, opened her first-ever interview with Hepburn by saying that she had been pursuing a sit-down with the star for years and was completely amazed “by how terrific she looked.”

By then, the 60-year-old Hepburn, who so many years earlier enchanted audiences as the epitome of young femininity and stardom, understood how to use her celebrity to redirect conversations toward her humanitarian efforts. It was the same charm she employed when she stood before Congress and shared that she had been "one of those children of war-ravaged Europe to receive help from UNICEF."

“I think that's when you really start to see the pieces coming together of, ‘Oh, she was an activist all along,’” Edmonson says. “And she's a star. She loves performing, she loves her work, but this was the endgame pretty much her entire life.”