Audrey Hepburn, the slender, doe-eyed Oscar-winning actress who enchanted moviegoers in such films as "Roman Holiday" and "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and in later years dedicated herself to feeding the world's hungry, died Wednesday of colon cancer.
She was 63 and died at her home in Tolochenaz, a lakeside village about 15 miles from Lausanne, Switzerland, where she had returned after intestinal surgery in November at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.
At the time, doctors were quoted as saying they expected a full recovery.
The death of the aristocratic, gamin-like star, who had long been a goodwill ambassador for the United Nations, was announced by a U.N. spokesman in New York.
She will be buried Sunday at the village church in Tolochenaz.
If Miss Hepburn sometimes found herself in Cinderella roles, the shoe fit. The sickly, scrawny teen-ager who suffered from malnutrition during World War II in Nazi-occupied Holland emerged in the 1950s as one of Hollywood's premier leading ladies, known for a persona that somehow blended sleek European sophistication and a vulnerable, waif-like innocence. Among her other films were "War and Peace," "Funny Face," "The Nun's Story," "Charade," "My Fair Lady" and "Wait Until Dark."
In her later years, she was more than just a pretty figurehead for the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund (UNICEF). Devoting herself to the role of goodwill ambassador in 1988, Miss Hepburn used her star appeal to raise a fortune for the charity and personally helped deliver aid to children in such disparate places as Ethiopia, Sudan, Guatemala, Venezuela, Bangladesh and Vietnam.
Last year she visited war-torn Somalia in a trip that helped focus world attention on the plight of starving children in that African nation.
Her death "is a painful and irreplaceable loss for her family, friends, for children everywhere and UNICEF," said UNICEF director James Grant.
In 1991, after traveling with her to Ethiopia, Grant told an interviewer that "what you see in Audrey Hepburn is exactly what you get. There is no public or private persona. She is what she seems to be. It may sound boring, but Audrey is one of the most special human beings I've ever met in my entire life."
Born Edda van Heemstra Hepburn-Ruston in Brussels to a Dutch noblewoman and British banker, Miss Hepburn seemed destined to a life of privilege. As a child she attended a private school in Great Britain but, after her parents' divorce, returned to live with her mother in The Netherlands. Fate had placed her in the path of history.
During five years of Nazi occupation, Miss Hepburn tried to lead a normal life in a family that suffered greatly. The Nazis executed her uncle and a cousin of her mother because of their efforts in the resistance movement, and placed her brother in a labor camp. "There was always a cloud of fear and repression," she said years later.
Like many children, Miss Hepburn suffered malnutrition because of food shortages--her family ultimately surviving on flour made from tulip bulbs. When she wasn't dreaming of becoming a ballerina, Miss Hepburn said later, she and her friends would dream of the food they would eat when the war was over.
When Holland was liberated, relief trucks were one step behind. But malnutrition had left Miss Hepburn, then 16, suffering from acute anemia, respiratory problems and edema--swelling of the limbs. But her spirit, the joie de vivre that would come across in her films, was intact.
"As long as he has the minimum," Miss Hepburn once explained, "a child is perfectly cheerful. I remember having lots of fun. We didn't just sit on the floor for five years and cry."
After the war's end, Miss Hepburn returned to London on a ballet scholarship, thanks to her early training. She pursued a dance career in nightclubs and West End revues and picked up odd modeling jobs and bit parts in British films.
Her storybook break came in 1951. She had a bit part in the forgettable "Monte Carlo Baby," being filmed on the French Riviera, when the French novelist Colette, then 78, picked her out of a crowd and declared she had found the perfect actress for a Broadway adaptation of one of her stories.
"My dear," Colette is said to have told her, "I have just cabled New York to tell them to stop looking for a Gigi. I have found her."
"I'm sorry, madame," Miss Hepburn responded, "but I can't act."
Off to America she went. She took a crash course in acting but proved so green that "Gigi" producer Gilbert Miller, only days before the play's premiere in Philadelphia, considered dropping her in favor of an experienced actress. But he didn't, and soon Miss Hepburn was being hailed as the freshest face on Broadway--"as fresh and frisky as a puppy out of a tub," declared New York Times critic Walter Kerr.
