In her performance as Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Audrey Hepburn, an idol, became indestructible.
As she had such a significant impact on pop culture, she is still frequently mentioned today.
Even though the actress has been dead for a long time, her granddaughter Emma Ferrer still bears a likeness to her.
April 20, 1994 saw the birth of Emma Ferrer. Little over a year had passed since the legendary Audrey Hepburn, her paternal grandmother, passed away. Ferrer, in actuality, never met her grandma, but over the course of the last 28 years, she has learned a lot about her.
She has a general notion of what her late grandma was like as a person and performer from either seeing movies that her grandmother was in or information that has been provided to her by family members.
“Slowly, I started going to friends’ houses and seeing that she was in a poster in their kitchen, or I would see her on a T-shirt or on handbags. (It was like), ‘I guess this actually is a bigger deal than I thought it was,’” Ferrer said in an interview.
“She really revolutionized what we take for granted today … which is to have a celebrity of her magnitude associated with a cause like she was,” Ferrer said of her grandmother. “But at the time — I don’t know if we can really appreciate how revolutionary that, in fact, was.”
According to Ferrer, the fact that she collaborates directly with UNICEF gives her and the author “a way for me to really kind of feel a connection to her that … I’ve struggled to feel otherwise.”
Emma Ferrer shares her grandmother’s good looks, even though they may not have been able to connect on a personal level. The young woman, who works as an artist, has the same dark hair and expressive eyes as her grandma.
Sean Hepburn Ferrer, the deceased actress’s older child from her first marriage to actor Mel Ferrer, is the father of Emma. By her second marriage to Italian physician Andrea Dotti, she produced a further son named Luca Dotti.
Emma describes how her father has shared with her tales about her late grandma that she would not have otherwise heard.
“There’s been an intimacy in what my dad tells me about her and the stories that people who knew her tell me about,” Ferrer said.
“Working on set, she would use her lunch break to cook lunch for the whole crew. She did this famous — I guess it was a series on gardens of the world with this … famous news TV personality. … This news person, she got a stain on her shirt, and so my grandmother took her shirt and went and laundered it in her hotel room dry cleaner.”
“These little things, she always brought flowers, and she would bring breakfast in bed if you were staying at her house,” Ferrer continued. “(She) just did these little things that make her seem like she was just the best, the nicest person,” Ferrer shares of what she knows and has heard.
Ferrer also extols the virtues of her grandmother’s decision to put her family before her career.
“She had this huge career, and she took really big steps back from it when my dad and his brother were born. She kind of put her whole career on the line for them and turned down movies, where her agent and her husband even were like, ‘What are you doing? You have to take this role,” Ferrer says proudly.
It is thought that Hepburn’s actions were motivated by her own father-child interactions when she was a child. According to reports, she and her own father, Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, had a “really fraught” relationship.. Ferrer adds, “She understood what it meant to have that pain with parents, and so I really think that she took her relationship with her kids really seriously.”
She also highlights how her grandmother was “a child of a generation afflicted by war,” something which colored her worldview and her life.
“She started working as a ballerina, and that didn’t work out. And then she was sort of immediately flung into this arena — this world of Hollywood — and I think that coming off of the heels of the Second World War … everything was just moving faster,” Ferrer said.
Although Hepburn’s family was aristocratic, the fact that they were “living off of bread” during the war which made her realize, “I’m never going to be so attached to material things, no matter what” according to Ferrer.
Which is why the belongings Hepburn left behind are “not very valuable,” per se, but is nonetheless “precious,” according to Ferrer.
“I have her little linen teddy bear that’s so old and has a coffee stain on it, and it’s still on my bed at my dad’s house. And I have sweaters that I just have worn so much over the years, and I’ll put it on and forget that it’s hers,” she added.
She also has some costume jewelry her grandmother wore in movies. She says, “They’re things made of not valuable metals at all, but it’s a nice way again to feel like … she’s teaching me things.”
She has also learned that life is much more essential than everything else from her grandmother. She said her grandmother was, “putting the life of a child before politics, before anything else.” “She was always very apolitical,” she adds.
She wonders what her grandmother would think of the current situation of the world as a result. She says, “I would love to have … a trailer for everything that has happened since she’s died, and then just been like, ‘Alright, so, hit me. What are your thoughts today?’”
Ferrer claims the experience of watching her grandmother’s movies to get to know her can be bittersweet. She shares, “It’s a very abstract thing, and I’m surprised that you pick up on that.” Continuing, “It’s this dichotomy of wishing that I had had the chance to know her and also feeling really intimidated by who she is. … It’s like a push and pull a little bit in that way.”
She says her grandmother was a kind person, stating, “Something that my dad always says about her, which I think is so interesting, is that no one has anything bad to say about Audrey Hepburn ever, which is so true. It’s like, what could you possibly say bad about her?”
Since Audrey Hepburn’s granddaughter Emma Ferrer was never allowed to meet her, it is genuinely heartwarming to witness how she preserves her grandmother’s legacy.
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