Audrey Hepburn - Dutch Resistance courier

Her father was Joseph Anthony Hepburn-Ruston, a wealthy British banker and Mosleyite. Her mother was Ella van Heemstra, a Dutch baroness who descended from French and English kings.

Her father abandoned her, and her mother abandoned her fascist views following the Nazi occupation.

16-year-old Audrey served as a volunteer nurse in a Dutch hospital during the war. She also ran messages and performed in underground concerts to raise funds for the Dutch Resistance.

Comments

I didn't know about this, but

I didn't know about this, but it appears that the story of her alleged resistance activities originates in one biography but there is no actual evidence to be found for it, according to the Dutch Airborne Museum who tried, in 2016, to verify it.

spacious wrote: I didn't know

spacious

I didn't know about this, but it appears that the story of her alleged resistance activities originates in one biography but there is no actual evidence to be found for it, according to the Dutch Airborne Museum who tried, in 2016, to verify it.

You got any more info about this? Just looked into it again on Google and it is reported in loads of different places, particularly about her doing dance performances to raise money for the resistance which had to be performed in silence, which she later commented about.

Also this article in The Mirror states there are photographs which were put on display in an exhibition in 2015, although you can't view the photos in the article: http://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/audrey-hepburn-nazis-how-wartime-6049007

In terms of the original source, do you know what biography that is? Here it is reported in an American newspaper from 1964: https://www.newspapers.com/clip/937860/audrey_hepburns_work_for_the_dutch/

edited to add, also found that she spoke about it herself in a video interview, which was later shown on CNN, transcript here:

HEPBURN: Didn't know how long the war was going to last, so I went to a ballet school and learned to dance. And then about 1944, about a year before the end of the war, I was quite capable of performing. That was sort of some way in which I could make some contribution, and I did give performances to collect money for the underground, which always needed money. http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0312/24/lkl.00.html

A biography by Barry Paris

A biography by Barry Paris was one of the places where the story appears, but not the only one. I just got it from the Dutch wikipedia page - https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Hepburn - that the aforementioned museum debunked it, because they didn't find any evidence for it in any archive. The museum director said they found it unlikely that "the resistance would have called on her" but of course it doesn't at all preclude that Hepburn may have given money earned with dance performances at the time to someone involved in underground actions.

The other things Hepburn would have been involved in was delivering resistance papers, internal messages and 'helping to evacuate British soldiers to liberated areas'. I don't know how credible that is.

This is what the wikipedia article lists as the source (Dutch public news broadcaster):
http://nos.nl/artikel/2143538-mythe-ontkracht-audrey-hepburn-werkte-niet-voor-het-verzet.html