Description: one thing leads to another
When Audrey Hepburn passed away on January 20, 1993, I was 19 and a sophomore in college. In that nascent Internet era, this meant the news of Hepburn’s death propagated through newspapers, magazines, and TV/cable news.
At the time, I was nominally familiar with Hepburn as an actor – I’d been introduced to her when my middle school English teacher showed us My Fair Lady after reading George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion – but I knew nothing about her other performances until mass media became saturated with the news of her untimely demise from a late-stage cancer diagnosis. The loss was all the more tragic because she had been devoting her post-acting career to humanitarian efforts with the United Nations Children’s Fund (
In the weeks following her death, there was no shortage of retrospectives on her life, career, and humanitarian work, but People , Life , and Time magazines dominated the newsstands by pulling from Time, Inc.’s vast archive of photos. I was particularly drawn to the still images since I was thinking of becoming a photojournalist, and had always been attracted to old Hollywood glamour portraiture.