Enchantment: The Life of Audrey Hepburn

I just love this book! I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a true Queen, very classy lady and a very private woman!

This was the first book by Donald Spoto that I read. It was wonderful. He covers so much ground with just enough detail to make you feel as if you knew Audrey, while at the same time steers clear of run-on sentences that bore one to tears. Interesting, funny, sad and poignant, Mr. Spoto's writing style has led me to purchase his biography on Alfred Hitchcock as well. Can't wait to read it!

I really loved this biography on Audrey Hepburn as well as previous biography I read by Alexander Walker `Audrey Her Real Story'. What grabbed me was the cover of 'Enchantment', which is now in paperback, but I had to review the hardback edition because the photo of Audrey is my absolute favorite shot of her. As soon as I saw it I knew I had to read about her life. I got this book in January 2007. I didn't feel it went into as much detail as `Audrey Her Real Story', but both deserve a space on any fans bookshelf. The book was also an objective take on her life and that took a little getting used to. I love how Donald Spoto incorporated some of Audrey's letters to others, and poems, as well as key lines from films like `The Children's Hour'. It was well researched. `Enchantment' goes into more detail then `Audrey Her Real Story' about Alfred Hitchcock's attempt to cast her in the film `No Bail for the Judge'. Audrey wouldn't have been right in an Alfred Hitchcock picture but I love his work and it would have been intriguing. This film never went ahead. Audrey's favorite film was `The Nun's Story'. It is brilliant. Instead of chapter titles, Donald marks his chapters by the years of Audrey's life. Everything appears to be accounted for. The pictures are wonderful. I have considered reading her son's biography on his mothers life entitled 'Audrey Hepburn, An Elegant Spirit A Son Remembers' by Sean Hepburn Ferrer, but haven't done so yet. I'm sure it is excellent. I may do it one day, however right now I feel completely satisfied with my knowledge on Audrey Hepburn's life and films.

More than a decade after her death, Audrey Hepburn remains an ideal of femininity in cinema and a role model for film stars in the Golden Age of Hollywood. Donald Spoto has penned a biography that manages successfully to tread the delicate line between treating her with proper reverence while offering genuine insight into her life and personality. Abandoned early on by a roue of a father and raised by a caring but distant mother, Hepburn began as an aspiring ballet dancer in war-torn Holland. She rose to stardom both on Broadway and in Hollywood with astonishing speed, winning both the Tony and Oscar by the time she was twenty-five years old. She managed her career with a shrewdness that belied her delicate, vulnerable screen persona, rarely making any missteps in preserving a carefully constructed screen image, though Spoto turns an unwavering, and to this reader unnecessarily harsh, eye on many of her most popular films. Her private life was much less perfect. The author analyzes her two relatively long-term, by Hollywood standards, but unhappy marriages to fellow cinema actor Mel Ferrer and Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti, and many love affairs with a sympathetic tone that avoids sensationalization. His revelations concerning the star's passionate, doomed affair with playwright Robert Anderson during the filming of one of her best movies, Fred Zinneman's The Nun's Story, make moving reading. He achieves a signal success in implying a connection between Hepburn's surprisingly voracious sexual appetites and her emotionally barren childhood without clumsily stating the obvious. Carefully researched, as evidenced by the many footnotes, Spoto's work is on the whole a model for film-star biographies. Ultimately he achieves his goal of bringing Hepburn to life in these pages, painting a portrait of a woman surprisingly anxious and insecure despite outward physical beauty and enviable artistic and commercial success, who never found true fulfillment in her personal life (except perhaps with her last partner, Robert Wolders), but did eventually find it in her untiring work for UNICEF, before tragically succumbing to cancer at all too early an age. For Hepburn the artist, despite extended discussions of most of her important films, one might have wished for a more balanced assessment, as well as a detailed filmography, the lack of which is the book's one real defect. Still, "Enchantment" is a remarkable achievement and easily transcends its frequently tawdry genre.

I am very impressed with Donald Spoto's review of Audrey Hepburn. Reading Mr. Spoto's biography of Audrey Hepburn shows a huministic side of the actress and woman the world loved and adored. This book is a wonderful addition to Sean Ferrer's book and Barry Paris's book. I am sure anyone that buys this book will enjoy it as much as I do.