MY MOTHER, AUDREY

As Lily Collins prepares to play Audrey Hepburn in a film about Breakfast at Tiffany's, the iconic film star's son offers a glimpse into her life and says she was a 'perfect package of imperfections'

- 

Audrey Hepburn is a totem for minimalist fashion and a symbol of Hollywood's golden age, living on in the public imagination long after her death more than 30 years ago.

But for her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer, there is a glaring omission he hopes to set right: her original singing voice as it was meant to be heard in her 1965 film My Fair Lady.

Speaking exclusively to HELLO!, he says that he hopes to correct the injustice inflicted upon his mother’s career when Warner Bros decided to dub her singing with the voice of Marni Nixon.

“In the [movie] business today, nobody would dream of [dubbing] her with someone like Marni Nixon, who sounds like a canary,” he says. “It’s doubly ridiculous because you've got Professor Higgins talking his way through the songs and my mother has to sing like an opera singer.”

Sean hopes that Paramount's move to buy Warner Bros could open the door to a re-release of My Fair Lady with Audrey's vocals restored. “I heard the original recordings and there are some places where she’s slightly below the note, [but] today, autotune has become acceptable in the recording industry. It could be fixed.”

Sean, who is speaking to promote Intimate Audrey: The Authorised Biography, which he co-wrote with the novelist Wendy Holden, knows better than anyone the gulf between his mother's public persona and her personal life. Her image lives on in so many thousands of photographs that he used to play a travel game with his children called “three minutes to find Granny”, in which they competed to find her likeness on merchandise and posters. “It was a game few ever lost,” he says.

HIDDEN INSECURITIES

And yet the mountain of photographs she left behind is evidence not of her confidence, he tells HELLO!, but of her well-hidden insecurity.