Audrey Hepburn: her most beautiful late role, holding children's hands

In 1988, at fifty-nine, Audrey Hepburn made a decision: she accepted UNICEF's invitation to serve as a Goodwill Ambassador.

When the news broke, her fans were sorry. The woman who had defined elegance for a generation — Princess Ann in Roman Holiday, Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany's — would now rarely be seen in front of a camera. Her own explanation was plain. "I was hungry as a child," she said. "I know what hunger tastes like."

She had made dozens of films and won an Oscar. What she kept returning to in later years was something else. In the Netherlands during the war, in the years when there was almost nothing, she ate tulip bulbs and filled her stomach with flour paste stirred into porridge. Food sent by relief organizations saved her life. That memory slept inside her body for decades, until children began appearing on the television news — children so thin that only their large eyes were left — and she saw herself at seven.

For more than five years as ambassador her schedule was fuller than any film star's: Ethiopia, Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Somalia. She went to the hardest front lines — refugee camps, nutrition centers, vaccination points set up in open desert. A day might begin in a tent where a mother held a child against her ribs to keep it warm, and end in a field hospital where the queue did not move fast enough. She sat on the ground with children, held the thinnest ones and tipped water to their mouths, sang with them. There is a famous photograph: she sits cross-legged in the middle of a group of children, no fine clothes, no makeup, a small thin boy in her arms, laughing with her whole face.

What she saw in Somalia broke her. Back in Europe she told reporters a sentence that has been quoted ever since. "People ask me whether these disasters make you despair. I say no. Despair is looking into these children's eyes and turning away."

On screen she played a princess. In life she said the most beautiful role of all needs no script.

Her way of speaking was Hepburn's own: graceful and direct. She addressed UN forums and asked for budgets on behalf of children who had no voice. She spent all of her fame on one thing — moving the cameras off herself and onto the children. A reporter asked why she worked so hard so late in life. Her answer has traveled a long way since: "As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands. One for helping yourself, the other for helping others."

The people who traveled with her remembered the details. She got airsick, and still sat through the bucking of small planes over jungle. Her body was long past long journeys, and still she insisted on walking to every single child. "You can take the photograph," she said. "But the child needs to be seen." After every trip she came home and fell ill.

In January 1993 she died of cancer at home in Switzerland. She was sixty-three. Near the end her son asked whether she had any regrets. "I have no regrets," she said. "I only don't understand why so many children are still suffering."

UNICEF's archive still holds the footage from those journeys. The children she carried have long since grown up. Someone asked one of them whether he remembered that lady. He did. "She crouched down and looked me in the eye," he said. "Everyone was looking at her. She was only looking at me."