Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Celebrity biographer Spoto (The Art of Alfred Hitchcock) offers a sparkling, fawning life of the European gamine whom America took to instantly with her 1953 debut in Roman Holiday. Hepburn (1929–1993) held the irresistible charm of a childlike star naïvely unaware of her appeal, from her first big break at age 22 when selected by Colette herself to play the Broadway version of Gigi. Born to a Dutch baroness and an English ne'er-do-well (and fascist sympathizer) who separated when she was six, Hepburn and her mother underwent horrendous deprivations during the Nazi occupation of Holland during WWII; her early ambition to become a ballet dancer was undermined by inadequate nutrition and training. Her early film successes flowed astonishingly, however, from Sabrina, Funny Face, Love in the Afternoon, Breakfast at Tiffany's and My Fair Lady to attempts at roles with more gravitas, as in The Nun's Story and Wait Until Dark. Often paired with older, avuncular leads, Hepburn was viewed as unerotic, yet Spoto tracks her steamy relationships with playboys and co-stars, and marriage to American actor-director Mel Ferrer, who often acted as her Pygmalion. Her later work with UNICEF is sketched too briefly. Spoto's previous Hollywood biographies allow the author authoritative access to Hepburn. (Sept.)
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From Booklist

Spoto's career has taken on an interesting split personality lately, as he has alternated between celebrity biographies (of Ingrid Bergman and Jackie Onassis, for example) and thoughtful accounts of such religious figures as Jesus and St. Francis. Here he returns to celebrities but chooses a subject, Audrey Hepburn, whose image makes her seem almost ethereal. And yet, as Spoto reveals, her life was plagued with all-too-human difficulties and sorrows. Virtually abandoned by her father, Audrey spent her childhood in Nazi-occupied Holland. Her parents had been Fascists, but Hepburn's mother's personal experience with Nazi brutality led her to join the Dutch Resistance, sometimes using young Audrey in her work. The Hepburn vulnerability, with which moviegoers so identified, originated in this time of upheaval, but Spoto reveals that she also developed a good deal of steel in her spine, a useful attribute in her later life, when she faced myriad personal problems, particularly with her husbands. Several good biographies of Hepburn have been published recently, including a photographic memoir by her son, Sean Ferrar (2003), from which Spoto borrows generously here. But he also does a seamless job of weaving together his own research and interviews, and he offers keen-eyed insights and analyses of Hepburn's movies. Unlike so many biographies, this one is not simply a recitation of the subject's accomplishments. Spoto's digs beneath the surface, giving readers strong images of both actress and woman, and he does so in way that is, like Audrey Hepburn, quite elegant. Ilene Cooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Harmony; 1ST edition (September 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307237583
• ISBN-13: 978-0739474792
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #75,645 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

47 of 48 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Hepburn's Life and Career Skillfully Examined With Sympathy and Offers Some Surprises, September 21, 2006

By	Ed Uyeshima (San Francisco, CA USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

There are already a number of posthumous biographies of the fabled star on the market, the most notable being her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer's loving 2003 memoir, "Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit: A Son Remembers". Author Donald Spoto adds another one, a respectful portrait that may lack the personal detail Ferrer provides but at the same time, allows enough distance from the subject to be a bit more objective. In 1983, Spoto wrote a fascinating profile of Alfred Hitchcock where the legendary filmmaker came across as a repressed, twisted individual whose outlet was the terror he could instill in his films. This time, he etches an in-depth portrait of a woman whose vulnerability, personal insecurity, and innate love of family endeared her to all those exposed to her - Hepburn's inner circle, friends, colleagues, lovers and ultimately the world.

The facts of her life and career are already well known - near-starvation during WWII where she spent her childhood in beleaguered Belgium and Holland, a legendary screen career sparked by a fortuitous debut in 1953's "Roman Holiday", and her selfless work on behalf of UNICEF during her later years. What Spoto adds are multi-textured portraits of Hepburn's parents, surprisingly both Fascist sympathizers whose opinions diverged during the war - he abandoned the family with his beliefs intact, while her mother grew frustrated and joined the resistance movement. Hepburn's film career is well documented here, as are her personal relationships. She wed twice, bearing sons with each marriage - her first husband, Mel Ferrer, is described by her friends as controlling and guardedly jealous of her meteoric success, while her second husband, Andrea Dotti, a psychiatrist, is shown to be a notorious womanizer.

The author also covers Hepburn's own love affairs, often extramarital, with actors William Holden (rejected due to his inability to bear more children), Albert Finney and Ben Gazzara, as well as a newly revealed relationship with screenwriter Robert Anderson, who adapted 1959's "The Nun's Story" for her. Spoto believes this particular movie represents her best screen work as it melded memories of her difficult childhood with her newfound confidence as a serious dramatic actress. It's obvious that Hepburn's Hollywood years is what holds most of the author's fascination, as he is relatively cursory in covering her UNICEF years and her enduring relationship with former actor Robert Wolders. Nonetheless, the book represents a more objective treatment of Hepburn's life than others' efforts, and for that reason, it is a worthwhile read. At the same time, Spoto is as susceptible to her charms as the rest of us, and his periodic fawning is entirely excusable within that context.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 4 1/2 Respect and Admiration, January 2, 2007

By	M. Allen Greenbaum (California) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

When I think of some of his previous work, Donald Spoto's priorities seem geared towards including enough scintillating information for good PR and improved sales. Perhaps I've been unfair. Not only does has he done historical work (Amazon.com called my attention to his historical biographies), but this is a well-researched, non-sensationalist biography of Ms. Hepburn. If anything, it could have standed something less objective, some sort of socio-cultural analysis of how we were and remain completely smitten with her, but Mr. Spoto shows restraint. A remarkable, truely admirable figure, this book illuminates some of her many roles both in and outside of Hollywood. There are some lovely black and white photos, but not many; one's hnger for that image must be satisfied elsewhere. One book cannot do its subject justice, but this is a very good beginning. You can appreciate Ms. Hepburn without having seen a single one of her films, but I can't think of one good reason why you'd want to.

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enchanting, January 1, 2007

By	klavierspiel "klavierspiel" (TX, USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

More than a decade after her death, Audrey Hepburn remains an ideal of femininity in cinema and a role model for film stars in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Donald Spoto has penned a biography that manages successfully to tread the delicate line between treating her with proper reverence while offering genuine insight into her life and personality.

Abandoned early on by a roue of a father and raised by a caring but distant mother, Hepburn began as an aspiring ballet dancer in war-torn Holland. She rose to stardom both on Broadway and in Hollywood with astonishing speed, winning both the Tony and Oscar by the time she was twenty-five years old. She managed her career with a shrewdness that belied her delicate, vulnerable screen persona, rarely making any missteps in preserving a carefully constructed screen image, though Spoto turns an unwavering, and to this reader unnecessarily harsh, eye on many of her most popular films. Her private life was much less perfect. The author analyzes her two relatively long-term, by Hollywood standards, but unhappy marriages to fellow cinema actor Mel Ferrer and Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, and many love affairs with a sympathetic tone that avoids sensationalization. His revelations concerning the star's passionate, doomed affair with playwright Robert Anderson during the filming of one of her best movies, Fred Zinneman's The Nun's Story, make moving reading. He achieves a signal success in implying a connection between Hepburn's surprisingly voracious sexual appetites and her emotionally barren childhood without clumsily stating the obvious.

Carefully researched, as evidenced by the many footnotes, Spoto's work is on the whole a model for film-star biographies. Ultimately he achieves his goal of bringing Hepburn to life in these pages, painting a portrait of a woman surprisingly anxious and insecure despite outward physical beauty and enviable artistic and commercial success, who never found true fulfillment in her personal life (except perhaps with her last partner, Robert Wolders), but did eventually find it in her untiring work for UNICEF, before tragically succumbing to cancer at all too early an age. For Hepburn the artist, despite extended discussions of most of her important films, one might have wished for a more balanced assessment, as well as a detailed filmography, the lack of which is the book's one real defect. Still, "Enchantment" is a remarkable achievement and easily transcends its frequently tawdry genre.