Her own worst admirer

Audrey Ruston was born in Brussels in May 1929, of a Dutch baroness, Ella van Heemstra, and an English father, Joseph Ruston, some kind of toff, among whose distant ancestors was James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, the third husband of Mary Queen of Scots. Ruston soon abandoned his wife and daughter for a long lifetime of alcohol and irresponsibility. Before he did so, he became an enthusiastic fascist. In 1935, he took the literally fellow-travelling Ella to Munich to have lunch with Hitler. After the war, Ruston hyphenated his name to embrace the Hepburn, from which his deprived daughter took her stage and film name.

Audrey and her mother were trapped in Arnhem when the Germans invaded the Low Countries in 1940. Holding British nationality, she was enrolled pseudonomously as a Dutch girl in the local school, and spent the whole war in a small village in increasing poverty. When a German convoy was ambushed in 1942, her favourite uncle and other family members were rounded up and shot.