By the time the 1970s began, Audrey Hepburn had already won an Oscar, a Tony, and had starred in some of the most commercially successful films of the 1950s and 1960s. She walked away from almost all of it deliberately.
Hepburn spent the majority of the 1970s living in Tolochenaz, a small village in Switzerland, with her second husband Andrea Dotti, an Italian psychiatrist she had married in January 1969. She focused on raising her son Luca, born in February 1970, alongside her older son Sean, from her first marriage to Mel Ferrer. She had experienced two miscarriages earlier in her life and treated motherhood as her primary commitment during this period. Switzerland was not a retreat from failure — it was a conscious choice made by a woman at the peak of her professional value.
She made only two films in the entire decade. The first was Robin and Marian in 1976, directed by Richard Lester, in which she played Maid Marian opposite Sean Connery’s aging Robin Hood. The film dealt directly with middle age, loss, and the passage of time — themes Hepburn actively wanted to explore on screen after years away. Her performance was quiet and emotionally precise. The second film was Bloodline in 1979, a thriller based on a Sidney Sheldon novel that was critically dismissed and is generally considered the weakest film of her career.
Her marriage to Dotti deteriorated steadily through the decade. His repeated infidelities were covered in the Italian press, and Hepburn remained in the marriage longer than most people around her expected, largely for the sake of Luca. The couple divorced in 1982.
Despite her withdrawal from Hollywood, she remained a visible presence in fashion. Givenchy continued to dress her throughout the decade, and she appeared in public at events in Paris and Rome looking as composed and precisely turned out as she had during her peak film years. Her relationship with Givenchy was personal as much as professional — he was one of her closest friends, and their connection had nothing to do with maintaining a public image.
The 1970s showed a version of Hepburn that the public rarely gets to see from major stars: someone who had everything the industry offers and genuinely preferred a quiet life in a Swiss village raising her children.
