Audrey Hepburn (born Audrey Kathleen Ruston; 4 May 1929 – 20 January 1993) was a British actress and humanitarian. Although modest about her acting ability, Hepburn remains one of the world's most famous actresses of all time, remembered as a film and fashion icon of the twentieth century. Redefining glamour with "elfin" features and a gamine waif-like figure that inspired designs by Hubert de Givenchy, she was inducted in the International Best Dressed List Hall of Fame, and ranked, by the American Film Institute, as the third greatest female screen legend in the history of American cinema.

Audrey Hepburn was born Audrey Kathleen Ruston on 4 May 1929 on Rue Keyenveld in Ixelles, a municipality in Brussels in Belgium. Her father, Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston (1889–1980), was British, though born in Úžice, Bohemia to an English/Austrian father and Austrian mother. Ruston had earlier been married to Cornelia Bisschop, a Dutch heiress he met in the Dutch East Indies. Although born Ruston, he later double-barrelled the surname to the more "aristocratic" Hepburn-Ruston, mistakenly believing himself descended from James Hepburn, third husband of Mary, Queen of Scots.