Top 44 Sean Hepburn Ferrer Quotes

I saw both sides, I saw normality in Switzerland as a kid and later on I saw the insanity of it all in Italy, which almost becomes hard to live with.

I’m always opening magazines and seeing pictures of her in advertisements. Or I’ll be in a hotel room in Tokyo and there she will be, on the television. Or I’ll be walking through an airport or driving along a freeway and there she will be on a billboard.

Not only did she represent inner and outer beauty and elegance, but all the work she did at the end of her life touched so many people. She created this extraordinary legacy.

I grew up in the countryside as a normal kid.

We weren’t a home-movie kind of a family. When that’s your work and you have to do it for a living, when it’s Christmastime, you don’t want to see a camera in the room.

My mother was not very good about keeping clothes; if they were outdated, she’d give them to an aunt or cousins or museums.

I think that emotional marks are made early on. Even if you can rationalize them as you grow up, they still leave that dank sadness you can never truly shake.

President Kennedy visited once, but that was in Switzerland and I remember the Secret Service men dressed in black swarming about the house.

It’s OK to choose your path, have a dream, not a fake one, and never let it get to your head then.

When I had to go to school and could no longer travel to be with her on the set, she gave up her career. She felt the most valuable thing was family.

I don’t know if my mum and President Kennedy ever dated, but they were friends and there are some letters from him that she kept – sweet and innocent letters saying, ‘Saw you in the play the other night and you were fantastic.’

I’m often asked what it was like to have a famous mother. I always answer that I really don’t know. I knew her first as my mother, and then as my best friend. Only after that did I understand that she was an actress, and with time that she was truly an exceptional actress.

Only after she had passed away did I fully comprehend to what extent she had truly touched everyone.

If she looks natural on screen, that’s just the way she was in life – very unassuming and full of life.

My father was a difficult and demanding man.

Because by the time I went to the village school in Switzerland, we’re talking about September 1965, she was finishing ‘Wait Until Dark’ which was released in ’66. That’s when she gave up being an actress to be a full-time mom – in a farmhouse with fruit trees.

I believe that you can’t know courage without conquering fear, and you can’t really know joy without knowing sadness.

A child deserves love, affection, the chance to just play and do nothing, to sit under a tree, read a book, dream and not have a care in the world.

But I believe that the huge advances now being made in genetic research will be the key to personalized medicine one day.

My mother believed strongly that every life matters. She demonstrated on a daily basis, particularly through her humanitarian work as a Goodwill Ambassador for UNICEF, her strong belief in the value of every life.

She lost a couple of pregnancies before me. It was sort of this great healing for her to finally have a child.

One of the reasons that fascism ascended to power so quickly was that it was considered socially elegant to support this new way of government.

We learned to separate, and accept the fact that my mother is gone, yet there she is on TV, on a billboard, sooner or later in a conversation, in a magazine on a regular basis.

Sometimes I will discover a whole shoot of my mother I have never seen before.

She was a wonderful mother. She was my best friend. Same for my brother. And it’s funny because we didn’t grow up in Hollywood. You know, once she decided that she needed to be a mother, she really gave up her career.

I believe my mother’s immune system was harmed because of all the vaccinations she needed to visit different countries, when her body was already weakened after an impoverished wartime childhood.

It’s very difficult to have a conversation about yourself when you’re the granddaughter of Audrey Hepburn, as it was difficult for me to have a conversation about something without, ‘What was she like? What was she really like?’

English is my last language.

She trained as a ballet dancer yet she was an iron fist in a velvet glove. My younger brother Luca and I had a wonderful childhood since she would try to guide us gently down the right path.

Communism and fascism were born out of frustration with an establishment that still knew royalty and possessed very few of the characteristics we commonly attribute to democracy today.

Even now, we’re surprised by the reach of my mum, so you can imagine our surprise at the interest in my daughter. We got calls from Hollywood companies wanting to do a reality show with her and we thought, ‘About what? We’re not a Hollywood family.’

I find that ‘Taare Zameen Par’ is one of the most beautiful movies ever made about the inner world of a child.

She was a lioness. She was described as an iron fist in a velvet glove. She needed that culture and background to survive in the world of Hollywood where you have to fight for everything.

I didn’t end her career. She chose to have children, then to make the simple choice that everyone should make really. You can’t be a movie star and have children and not have one of the two suffer.

I read an article some years back in which Emma Thompson demeaned my mother’s acting ability. My mother would be the first person to say that she wasn’t the best actress in the world. But she was a movie star.

I’ve learnt to separate the woman who was my mother from the person who was a movie star. The star has survived, my mother didn’t.

In her heart my mother much preferred the intense few days of shelling, which brought freedom, to the languishing fear she felt every time she stood by waiting for the Nazi troops and later for the SS to march by, singing their songs of victory and supremacy.

I also was deeply touched by ‘The Nun’s Story’ because it was the first time I saw my mother in something other than a romantic comedy.

I have a passion to make something that’s good, not merely OK.

I didn’t grow up in Hollywood – the place, or the state of mind.

I don’t feel like so many other celebrities’ kids, who hate their parents for abandoning them.

She performed for the Dutch Resistance, not just to raise money but also to entertain people and to take their minds off the horrors they were living through. They would do plays and little musicals, trying to be discreet and not bring the attention of the soldiers.

It wasn’t until I was 14 that I finally saw her films. We found an old 16-millimeter projector in the attic, put up a bedsheet – I ironed it myself – and watched reels that were given to her by Paramount.

We are brought together by the great feelings and it is the little stuff that breaks us apart.