The final winter of World War II had a lasting effect on Audrey Hepburn, then a teenager living in Holland. It was one of the coldest winters in European history, and it came as the Nazis were punishing the Dutch for their dogged resistance by letting their people starve. "We had nothing to eat but turnips and tulip bulbs," she once said. And then, lest her recollection sound self-pitying, Audrey immediately pressed on: "Tulip bulbs actually make a fine flour that is rather luxurious and can be used for making cakes and cookies." Only Hepburn could make you believe, for a moment at least, that it is possible to starve in style.

Of course, it isn't. It hurts to be hungry, and it was that remembered pain that propelled Audrey into a second career as roving ambassador for the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). "My childhood made me more receptive to the ravages of war," she said. But that wasn't the only reason she chose to help. Her mother, the Baroness Ella van Heemstra, also had something to do with Hepburn's need to serve. "It's that wonderful, old-fashioned idea that others come first and you come second," Hepburn said. "This was the whole ethic by which I was brought up. Others matter more than you do, so 'don't fuss, dear; get on with it.' "

And she did. Less than a week after she joined UNICEF full-time in 1988, Hepburn headed for civil war-torn Ethiopia. Naturally the media went with her. One reason she was so valuable to the organization was that she could generate instant interest in places where suffering was taken for granted. Hepburn held press conferences wherever she went. "I do not want to see [Ethiopians] digging graves for their children," she told one gathering of reporters. "As Gandhi said, 'Wars cannot be won by bullets but only by bleeding hearts.' "

Over the next four years, she frequently took to the road, making stops in Sudan, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bangladesh, Vietnam—and finally, in 1992, Somalia, the country where she felt the first piercing pain of her cancer. "She insisted on seeing the worst of the worst," says Madeline Eisner, a UNICEF official who accompanied Hepburn on the star's last mission of mercy.

Nothing shocked her more than what she saw during her three-day trip to Somalia in September. "I walked right into a nightmare," she later told reporters. "No media report could have prepared me for the unspeakable agony I felt seeing countless little, fragile, emaciated children sitting under the trees, waiting to be fed, most of them ill. I'll never forget their huge eyes in tiny faces and the terrible silence."

Usually she followed up her Third World trips with a different kind of travel—to the United States, Canada, Europe. In those places, she told of what she had seen—and people listened and wrote checks. Always, she played down her charisma as mere "visibility."

Whatever she wished to call her contribution, Audrey became, as a UNICEF spokesperson said, "our most powerful advocate for children." In 1992 she was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. At this year's Academy Awards ceremony, on March 29, she will posthumously receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Hepburn accepted such recognition gracefully, but always with a reminder that much work remained to be done. "I do my best," she said. "I wish I could do more."

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