Film scripts, dresses and other treasures from the late film legend Audrey Hepburn’s Swiss attic are going up for sale in London, offering a remarkable insight into her personal world.
“My mother kept it in the attic, quite literally,” Hepburn’s son Luca Dotti said, at a viewing of more than 500 lots at Christie’s auction house ahead of the sale next week.
“My mother was not a collector, but she kept every little bits and pieces for sentimental reasons”.
An array of luggage being sold off includes, a battered black-lacquered suitcase she is believed to have arrived in London with, to take up a ballet scholarship in 1948, before she became one of the world’s most famous actresses.
The working script for the 1961 film Breakfast at Tiffany’s , including deleted scenes, is another rarity being sold along with numerous other scripts featuring Hepburn’s hand-written notes. Glamorous dresses by designers including Givenchy and Valentino — which her son Sean Hepburn-Ferrer noted ‘few’ would fit into — have been put on display alongside playful clothing, including a 1964 Spanish matador outfit.
Hepburn was born in Belgium on May 4, 1929 and moved to the Netherlands with her family after the outbreak of the Second World War. She made her film debut in 1948, playing an air stewardess in Dutch in Seven Lessons , an educational travel film, and moved to London later that year to seek her fortune.
Hepburn had her first starring role in Roman Holiday (1953) as a European princess who falls in love with Gregory Peck who played an American journalist.
