CULTURE

Audrey in Paris

As a new book documents Audrey Hepburn’s enduring connection with the French capital, its author Meghan Friedlander reflects on the star’s relationship with a city that loved her right back

A lot of people think Audrey Hepburn was Parisian,’ says Meghan Friedlander, creator of the blog and Instagram account Rare Audrey Hepburn, and author of a new book, Audrey Hepburn In Paris. ‘They think of her relationship with Hubert de Givenchy and the fact she filmed so many of her movies in Paris, and they make the connection. So, they’re surprised when they find out she was born in Belgium and raised in the Netherlands.’

Friedlander first began paying tribute to Hepburn in 2010, when a friend suggested she set up a Tumblr account to channel her lifelong fascination with the star. ‘My mum was an Audrey fan – growing up, we had lots of books and magazines about her,’ she says. ‘We also lived near the Stanford Theatre in California, where they would play her old movies. We bonded over her.’

Originally a nostalgia project, Rare Audrey Hepburn has since expanded and changed platforms, but it’s always been a place in which Friedlander has celebrated her favourite moments from the actor’s life and career by sharing images and stories mined from forgotten places, such as vintage magazines from the 1950s and 1960s, and neglected audio files.

A year into the project, Hepburn’s son Luca Dotti got in touch. ‘He was working on a book about Audrey,’ remembers Friedlander, ‘and said that he’d been inspired by my blog. He later invited me to an exhibition about Audrey in London and asked if we could collaborate on something in the future.’

That collaboration would turn out to be Audrey Hepburn In Paris, a highly visual account of Hepburn’s enduring connection with the French capital in which Friedlander brings her own meticulous research together with stories and images passed down to Dotti by his late mother. From Hepburn’s first meeting with the beloved French author Colette in her Paris apartment – a moment that helped to launch her acting career, as she was then cast as the lead in the Broadway adaptation of Colette’s novel Gigi – to her iconic style and relationships within the fashion industry, there’s a chapter dedicated to every facet of Hepburn’s entanglement with the city.

‘Audrey and Paris were synonymous,’ says Friedlander. ‘They were both about fashion, romance and inspiration, but Paris was just where she loved to be, and where she had the most fun making movies. It was why she would always request, “Can I film this in Paris?”

‘There were a lot of stories I didn’t know about before writing this book,’ she adds. ‘Maybe I’d seen photographs, but I only knew surface details. To me, that’s what makes it so special – it’s full of things that could only come from the people she