Audrey Hepburn: An Intimate Portrait

Drawing heavily on interviews with the actress at her home in Switzerland during the last year of her life, Maychick's biography focuses on the film actress's life off-screen. Born to a family of Dutch nobility, Hepburn endured serious privation during WW II, performed courier duties for a Resistance organization headed by her mother, struggled against anorexic tendencies throughout her life and hated being the center of attention even as an international star. Maychick ( Meryl Streep ) examines Hepburn's marriages to actor Mel Ferrer and Italian psychiatrist Andreas Dotti and her affairs with such leading men as William Holden, Ben Gazzara and Albert Finney. The account of her career is a bland, uncritical chronicle of one dazzling performance after another. On the whole, however, this is a chatty, sympathetic portrait. Hepburn (1929-1993) found a measure of peace toward the end of her life through her relationship with Dutch actor Robert Wolders and her work for UNICEF as ambassador-at-large. Photos. First serial to Cosmopolitan. (Dec.)