Audrey Hepburn was famous for most of her life, and for most of that time people speculated about what she ate. Her elder son has now put the answer on the record.
Intimate Audrey, a new biography written by Sean Hepburn Ferrer with the author Wendy Holden, sets out what an ordinary day actually looked like.
The gossip, addressed directly
Ferrer takes on the decades of assumption that a woman that slim must have been ill. His account is that his mother cooked, baked and ate what she liked, and simply kept an eye on the size of the portions. He also points at the walking. She went out every day and set a pace the rest of the family found punishing to keep up with.
The day itself
Most mornings began with a boiled egg, toast and jam.
Lunch went either salad or soup, then a sandwich, then a scoop of the vanilla ice cream she liked best, with maple syrup poured over it.
She had a beer now and then. After her daily nap came a square of dark chocolate, which Ferrer says she treated as her remedy for low spirits, and then a finger of whiskey once the sun had gone down.
Supper was one plate of pasta pomodoro and a salad.
The Christmas pavlova
Speaking to People, Ferrer described the one thing she made without fail when the family came home for Christmas, which was her own version of a pavlova. It stayed on the table through dinner and on into the night, and everybody would slip into the cold room behind the kitchen at the house in Switzerland to take another piece. By the following morning it had gone.
What she actually liked
His summary is that she was a wonderful baker and a very simple cook who preferred simple things. She disliked nouvelle cuisine restaurants. What made her happy was a plate of spaghetti pomodoro with a little basil and Parmesan on it, and a salad beside it.