Spotlight: Audrey Hepburn Portraits Preview

Few can possess the mantle of icon, yet when it comes to Audrey Hepburn, (1929 –1993), another moniker just doesn't do her justice. This week, the National Portrait Gallery crowns the actress, mother, philanthropist just that, as it opens its doors to the eagerly anticipated photographic retrospective in her honour,  Audrey Hepburn Portraits of an Icon.

"We started putting the exhibition together in 2012 and really tried to represent in the show her key films and key places from her career - from films such as  War and Peace  and  Funny Face -  picking the most iconic shots from each. But she made about 30 films and we're restricted to about 80 pictures," co-curator of the exhibition Terence Pepper told us at an exclusive preview yesterday. "What was very exciting was getting permission to visit her official archive in California. It's extremely well catalogued and there are over 4000 photographs and press cuttings from her life that her mother and others had collected for her - and she kept things herself. It was really hard choosing 35 pictures out of that!"
Norman Parkinson, Cecil Beaton, Irving Penn, Terry O'Neill and Steven Meisel are all represented in the exhibition, as are many others, all of whom captured what Pepper recalls Hepburn's "new beauty".
"She was a totally new beauty, as Cecil Beaton said, with this sort of post-war glamour," continued Pepper. "What I like about her is her personality, her haircut and her eyebrows - they captivate me. And that she never wore high heels. She had an intelligence behind being sexy and she was very self-deprecating all the time. Her mother used to tell her all the time, 'I can't believe how far you've got with such little talent' - a terrible thing for a parent to say!"Few can dispute Hepburn's talent, nor her beauty, nor her style, all of which emanate from the walls of this intimate new exhibition.



Credit to Vogue.
THE PORTRAITS GALLERY:
  




















Photographed by Norman Parkinson, wearing 
Givenchy at the Villa Rolli, Cecchina near Rome 
during the filming of War and Peace, June 1955.
 
Photographed by Richard Avedon, New York, 
18 December 1953.
 

Slippers, donated by a private collector, 

that Hepbrun wore on the West End stage 

in the late Forties.

 

Photographed by Robert Wolders during a 

Unicef mission to Sudan, 1989.

 

Audrey Hepburn being directed on the set of Roman Holiday 

alongside co-star Gregory Peck, in 1952.

Portraits from Breakfast at Tiffany's, in role as Holly Golightly, 

photographed by Howell Conant in his New York studio, 1960.

Photographed by Cecil Beaton, wearing an ensemble of his creation, 

as she filmed My Fair Lady in 1963.

 

Photographed by Cecil Beaton on the set of

My Fair Lady with her dog, Assam.

 

Photographed by Vincent Rossell, wearing 

a Givenchy ski suit for Charade.

 

A collection of magazine covers starting in 1948.

 

Photographed with her fawn, Ip, in Gelson's supermarket 

in LA at the time of filming Green Mansions, 

photographed by Bob Willoughby in 1958.

 

Photographed by Phillippe Halsman for Life,

18 July 1955 issue.

 

Photographed wearing a hat made by Mr Fred,

designed and photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld in 1952.

 

Photographed by Irving Penn in Paris for American Vogue, 

for the November 1951 issue.

 

Hepburn in 1938 (top) and 1946 (bottom).