London - Audrey Hepburn was haunted by the diary of Anne Frank and felt an unbearable survivor’s guilt after reading the book, the star’s son has claimed.
Luca Dotti said his mother felt she and Miss Frank were “twins” because their experiences at the hands of the Nazis in the Second World War were so similar. Hepburn rarely spoke about her ordeal as a courier for the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of Holland.
The Dutch endured a famine which became known as the Winter of Hunger and Hepburn and her aristocratic mother survived on nettles, boiled grass and tulips.
In his new memoir, Audrey At Home, Dotti writes: “Anne Frank was born, like my mother, in 1929. Her diary stunned my mother. She never accepted the simple fact that she got luckier than Anne. She possibly hated herself for that twist of fate.”
He also claimed his mother turned down numerous offers to play Anne Frank on screen, saying: “She didn’t feel she would be able to relive that very painful past.”
Daily Mail