I'll bet you didn't know

I have always held the belief that Audrey Hepburn was the most beautiful woman I had ever laid eyes on.

Yup...the same Audrey Hepburn. That's her.

Recently for Father's Day, my daughter made me a CD in which she (my daughter) was talking to me through music about our 25+ years together. The last song on the CD was Audrey singing "Moon River" on the balcony in the movie "Breakfast at Tiffany's". I knew very little besides her beauty of this woman who left us nearly 15 years ago, but I was intrigued. What I found out was one third shocking, one third inspiring, and one third confirmation that beauty in some goes far deeper than eyes and skin tone.

It goes to the soul.

Born in 1929 in Arnhem, Netherlands, Audrey had no idea her surroundings were going to become some of the most dramatic of the 20th Century. In 1940, the Nazis invaded and occupied Arnhem. During the war, Hepburn adopted the pseudonym Edda van Heemstra, modifying her mother's documents, because an "English-sounding" name was considered dangerous. The name Edda was a version of her mother's name, Ella.

She was 10 at the time.

By 1944, aged 14, Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina. She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the underground movement. She later said, "the best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performance."

After the landing of the Allied Forces on D-Day, things grew worse under the German occupiers. During the Dutch Famine in the winter of 1944, the Germans confiscated the Dutch people's limited food and fuel supply for themselves. Without heat in their homes or food to eat, people starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits. Arnhem was devastated during allied bombing raids that were part of the failed British Field Marshall Montgomery's Operation Market-Garden. The outstanding film, "A Bridge too Far", made Market-Garden and Arnhem famous in the 1970's. Hepburn's uncle and a cousin of her mother's were shot in front of Hepburn for being part of the Resistance. Hepburn's half-brother Ian van Ufford spent time in a German labor camp. Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia and respiratory problems.

In a 1991 interview, Hepburn said, "I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child who would never return."

From 1988 until her death in 1993, she served as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her efforts. In 1999, she was ranked as the third greatest female movie star of all time.

I have her ranked a lot higher in life.