Audrey Hepburn in Marbella: the actress' hidden drama during blissful stay in the Costa del Sol

There are hundreds of books about Audrey Hepburn, though the definitive official biography was missing until now. More than three decades after her death, "intimate Audrey" has been published as the authorised biography of the legendary actress and fashion icon.

It is signed in her name by the "Breakfast at Tiffany's" star's "best friend", her son Sean Hepburn Ferrer, who wanted to give his account of the intimate, unknown facets of his mother.

This includes her experience as a young survivor of the Nazis which weighed on her throughout life, the difficulties she faced getting pregnant and her aversion to Hollywood's pretensions.

This led to her living in Europe and taking up residence in Switzerland before she exchanged the Swiss punctuality to spend lost hours in Marbella. The biography reveals that the peace which the actress sought on the Costa del Sol, which filled hundreds of newspapers and magazines, was an attempt to save the unsalvageable- her marriage to fellow actor Mel Ferrer.

"The day my mother caught me tiptoeing past my father's office and talking quietly to avoid one of his outbursts was the day she realised I had put up with too much. She was mortified to think that I was afraid of my own father. I'm convinced that was the moment she decided to leave him," Sean Hepburn Ferrer candidly recounts in this official memoir, which he co-signs with journalist Wendy Holden.

The couple officially separated in 1968, but their final stages coincide with their decision to buy a small plot of land to build a house, Santa Catalina, in Marbella. An idyllic space along the coastline that would shortly afterwards be christened as the Golden Mile, precisely due to Audrey Hepburn having a home there since 1964, among other things.

The "Sabrina" and "Holidays in Rome" star's eldest son does not write extensively in the book on those seasons in the Costa del Sol, although he does reveal previously unknown details. For example, his parents "spoke to him in Spanish when in Marbella" and had intended to spend winters in Spain to escape the Swiss cold.

The paradox of these memoirs is that Sean Hepburn Ferrer does not mention the company that surrounded Audrey and Mel in Marbella. Such as Prince Alfonso of Hohenlohe, who showed them the glamorous estate next to the Marbella Club hotel where they made their home; the Countess of Romanones and former CIA spy, the American Aline Griffith, with whom the actress went to the bullfights at the Malaga Fair; as well as the Rubinsteins, Arthur and Aniela, with whom she shared tea time and evenings with the legendary musician at the piano.

The authorised biography discovers that her closest friend in Malaga was another Hollywood actress, Deborah Kerr, who "ended up living not far from my mother in Switzerland and, later, in Marbella, right next to where my parents built a beautiful beach house".

The two shared youths marked by World War II and an arrival into "acting by chance", they "shared experiences" that "created a close bond and supported one another throughout their lives," says Hepburn's son, who even quotes his mother's exact words about their friendship: "I couldn't say, 'She was the best friend of my life. But, in a sense, perhaps she was." They didn't see each other all the time, but to paraphrase one of Deborah's great films, they professed a loyalty to each other from here to eternity.

In "Intimate Audrey", the biographer not only offers a first-person account of his mother but also seeks to debunk some urban legends about the actress that have become ingrained in the collective memory like a bad film.

He denies that her thinness was due to any eating disorder, makes it clear that she was not Katherine Hepburn's sister nor was she Marilyn Monroe's best friend, or that she married three times. In reality, she married twice, to the Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti and, previously, to his father, Mel Ferrer.

The son of both actors acknowledges that his mother's success was inversely proportional to his father's, and while he goes into great detail about his mother's films, such as "My Fair Lady" or "Charade", shot during those years of temporary residence in Marbella, he skirts around his father's films, just as he did as a child in front of his father's office.

In fact, he dismisses his father's attempt to become a director by describing that project as "a low-budget bullfighting musical", though he doesn't mention the title. That film was none other than the Spanish "Cabriola" (1965), shot in Marbella and Fuengirola, and starring the biggest star of the era: Marisol, from Malaga. By Hollywood standards, the film might seem like a B-movie, but not in Spain.

Pepa Flores (Marisol) herself didn't have fond memories of Mel Ferrer either. "He always kept his distance, whereas his wife was the complete opposite," said the star.

"The main problem was that the neurotic perfectionist I had for a father wanted to focus on acting, directing, and producing (...), while acting as a 'bully' regarding everything related to the contractual decisions for films," reveals Sean, who lists his mother's surname before his father's in his own surname order: Hepburn Ferrer.

Her last visit to Santa Catalina was in 1967. By then, the Hepburn-Ferrer marriage was finished, but the couple continued to be seen together. Especially at the bullfights, which made the front page of SUR. Not the bulls or the lineup featuring El Viti, Mondeño, and El Cordobés, but the couple under the headline "Celebrities on the Coast." She wore large black sunglasses and both watched the spectacle intently. Now "Intimate Audrey" provides a glimpse into the previously unseen drama in their lives at the time.