Audrey Hepburn as Princess Ann in her breakthrough film, Roman Holiday. (1953). New York, Sept 25: Hollywood beauty Audrey Hepburn desperately wanted to have children, but she always ended up getting hooked to sterile men, according to a new biography on the Oscar-winning actress.
In the early 1950s, Hepburn took up with married star William Holden, 11 years her senior, as the two made Sabrina, and "she was completely won over when he promised to divorce [his wife] and marry her," Donald Spoto writes in "Enchantment," out this week from Harmony Books.
"Audrey at once raised the issue of children: she wanted two, three, four and more - she would abandon her career to have a family . . . then he broke the news of his sterility." It turned out that Holden had undergone a vasectomy a few years earlier - at the request of his wife.
Later, Hepburn, after marrying Mel Ferrer in what turned out to be an unhappy union, took up with Robert Anderson, who wrote the screenplays for such classics as The Best Years of Our Lives and Rebecca.
She quickly told him about her desire to be a mother. "He took this as an implication that - were she to leave Mel for him - she wanted and expected to have children. With great sadness, Bob told Audrey that he could never be a father - he was congenitally sterile." She ended their affair, and later would finally give birth to a son with Ferrer in 1960, reports the New York Post.
Despite her inclination for fooling around with married men, she didn't like it when the shoe was on the other foot, once telling Ben Gazzara as they filmed Bloodline together in the late 1970s that her second husband, psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, had been cheating on her.
"Not only that Andrea has been unfaithful in her absences, but that he had chosen their home for his trysts. She was, she admitted, so distraught that she had seriously contemplated suicide," Spoto writes.
Soon after that revelation, Hepburn fell into the arms of Gazzara. "No promises were made," Gazzara recalled. "For us it was going to be an 'on-location romance."' Later, when Gazzara took up with another lover and Hepburn tried to visit him at his hotel, he refused to see her. (ANI)