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Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston in Ixelles, Belgium in 1929. Her father was a wealthy English banker, and her mother was a Dutch baroness. She had dual citizenship, and she spent much time in England growing up. In 1935, her parents divorced (her father was a Nazi sympathizer) and she went to a school in England for three years. In 1938 her mother moved to the Netherlands, and she went to school there and studied ballet. In 1940, the Netherlands were occupied by the Nazis, and Hepburn spent the rest of the war living in a Nazi occupied country. After the war, she lived in Amsterdam and continued studying and performing ballet. But she could not earn much money, and in 1948 she started acting as well, and also modeling. She appeared in several minor roles over the next few years.In 1951 she played the lead in in the Broadway play Gigi, and the following year she had her best film role to date in Secret People.The next year she starred in Roman Holiday (winner of the Best Actress Academy Award for this film) opposite Gregory Peck, and that made her an international star. After she filmed Roman Holiday she returned to New York and starred in Gigi for another eight months! The following year she starred in Sabrina (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), opposite Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. After filming, she returned to the stage and starred in Ondine, and won a Tony Award, at the same time she was receiving her Oscar for Roman Holiday! She followed with a long string of hits, including Nun's Story (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), Breakfast At Tiffany's (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film) and My Fair Lady (she did not know until after signing to star that she would not sing in the movie). She did not star in the movie version of Gigi because she wanted to star in Funny Face instead, because she had been a professional dancer and she got to dance with Fred Astaire. In 1967 she starred in the fine thriller Wait Until Dark (nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award for this film), and she decided to retire at the peak of her career and devote her time to her children, something few actors have ever done. She came out of retirement for the wonderful Robin and Marian in 1976 (opposite Sean Connery) and then made four more movies over the next 13 years, and passed away in 1993 from an unusual form of abdominal cancer at the age of 63. Just as Marilyn Monroe was THE female icon of the 1950s, Audrey Hepburn was THE female icon of the 1960s. Will there ever be another actress who has this much impact on the world? I doubt it!

Important Added Info: Note that this is a "studio-issued" negative. What is it? It was produced by the studio but is not the camera original. It is very high quality and was created in quantity by the studios and sent to media outlets or other places that had need of the very highest quality image for reproduction purposes (in newspapers, magazines, or elsewhere). We have put a scan of the negative that shows the "positive image" (in addition to an image of the negative image). REMEMBER THAT WHAT YOU RECEIVE WILL BE A PHOTOGRAPHIC NEGATIVE, NOT A POSITIVE IMAGE LIKE YOU ARE SEEING (however, the archive that owned this made an 8x10 positive print from it that will be included with the negative). However, we will provide the winning bidder of this auction that positive image scan that is both high quality and not watermarked (on request to the winning bidder, and only the winning bidder). The negative is in a plastic sleeve (but we removed it and scanned it, so that bidders could see just how high quality it is). It will be sent to the winner of the auction in its sleeve.

Note that this negative (and 96 others we are currently auctioning, in 97 separate auctions) has a wonderful provenance! From 1938 through the 1960s, movie fans would purchase photos of their favorite movie stars from a company in Brooklyn, New York, called "Movie Star News". This company, owned by Irving Klaw, sold a massive number of repro photos, because it became widely known to have some of the highest quality movie star images there were, as good or better than what the studios themselves produced. It turns out that Klaw had obtained the negatives that he made his photos from directly from the major studios, who apparently did not want to store negatives due to the fear of them being a fire hazard. He amassed an unmatched collection of over 20,000 negatives of all the top Hollywood stars, and over half of them were "camera originals", meaning they were the ones in the camera when the photographer took the image, and were hand retouched by the photographer (if retouching was necessary).

Irving Klaw died in 1966, and his nephew continued his business for many years, but he closed the business in 2012, and the archive of negatives passed through several hands before being acquired by a company that hired a professional archivist to spend over a year cataloging the negatives. The 97 negatives we are currently auctioning are from this amazing archive, and approximately half of them are camera originals, and half are "studio negatives" (created by the studio directly from the camera original). See above for which type of negative the one in this auction is. These include wonderful images of top Hollywood stars! This is an amazing opportunity to not only purchase ultra rare negatives, but also to obtain ones from one of the most legendary archives ever assembled!

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