Audrey Hepburn: Portraits Of An Icon

Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon will follow Hepburn’s rise to fame, from her early years in Holland and as a dancer and chorus girl in London’s West End, to her becoming a stage and screen icon, culminating in her philanthropic work in later life. The exhibition will showcase rarely seen photographs from the collection of the Hepburn family along with iconic portraits of Hepburn by leading photographers of the twentieth century, including Richard Avedon, Cecil Beaton, Angus McBean, Irving Penn and Norman Parkinson.

Highlights from the exhibition will include family photographs of Hepburn practising ballet as a young woman, and examples of her early work in London as a fashion model for photographs by Antony Beauchamp, in addition to the highly successful Crookes Lacto-Calamine skin cream campaign, photographed by Angus McBean in 1950.

A rarely seen series of photographs by Mark Shaw, taken during the making of Sabrina in 1953 and published as a photo essay in Life magazine, will offer a unique insight into Hepburn’s life on and off-set, as Shaw was granted unprecedented behind-the-scenes access for the photo essay.

Photographs by Larry Fried, showing Hepburn in her dressing room on Broadway for Gigi (1951); Hepburn captured in Italy during the filming of War and Peace (1955) by Philippe Halsman and George Daniell; publicity photographs for Funny Face (1957); and Terry O’Neill’s on-set photographs during the making of films How to Steal a Million (1966) and Two for the Road (1967) will be among the portraits on show, documenting Hepburn’s transformation throughout the 1950s, and her key roles on stage and screen.