Robert Wolders obit

Robert Wolders, Actor and Longtime Audrey Hepburn Companion, Dies at 81

Dutch actor Robert Wolders, the longtime companion of 'Breakfast at Tiffany's' star Audrey Hepburn and former husband of actress Merle Oberon who appeared on the TV Western 'Laredo' and in films like 'Beau Geste,' has died. He was 81. 

He was not on the list.

Dutch actor Robert Wolders, the longtime companion of Breakfast at Tiffany’s star Audrey Hepburn who starred on the 1960s TV Western Laredo and appeared in films like Beau Geste, has died. He was 81.

Wolders died Thursday “surrounded by loving family,” according to Ellen Fontana, executive director of the Audrey Hepburn Children’s Fund. She said his family did not wish to divulge any other details of his death. He was a member of the board of directors of the fund.

Wolders was the fourth husband of actress Merle Oberon (Wuthering Heights, The Scarlet Pimpernel), married to her for about four years until her death in 1979 at age 68 from stroke complications. They starred opposite each other as lovers in the May-September romantic drama Interval (1973), her final film.

The actor met the Oscar-winning Hepburn in 1980 as her marriage to Italian psychiatrist Andrea Dotti was winding down, and they were together when the icon of Hollywood and style died from a rare cancer of the appendix on Jan. 20, 1993. She was 63.

“I have a wonderful man in my life, I have my Robert,” Hepburn said in a 1989 interview with Barbara Walters. “We have so much in common, he’s so good to me, he takes great care of me. He gives me that marvelous feeling that I’m protected and that I’m the most important thing to him.” “After I’d met her, a mutual friend prompted me to ask her out for dinner, but she said she had a night shoot,” Wolders told People magazine last year. “I thought it was her gentle way of rejecting me.

“The next day she invited me for a drink at the Pierre hotel, which turned into a three-hour talk. At one point she said, ‘Do you mind if I order some pasta?’ After many long phone conversations, we realized we were meant to be together. She asked me if she could take time to prepare [her son] Luca and Andrea, her soon-to-be-ex-husband. When she saw him, Andrea came over and said, ‘You look very beautiful, you must be in love,’ and she said, ‘I am.'”

Hepburn was a longtime UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, and Wolders accompanied her on many of her missions for the children’s charity, including her last one, to Somalia, in 1992.

After Hepburn’s death, he dated Gigi star Leslie Caron and then had a two-decade relationship with Shirlee Fonda, the fifth wife of late actor Henry Fonda.

“The odd thing is that Shirlee was a great friend of Audrey and a great friend of Merle. In the same circle. Maybe it sounds odd,” Wolders said in a 2012 interview. “They were friends, each one, and I knew that Merle would have approved of me being with Audrey certainly, instead of becoming the extra man. And Audrey would have approved of Shirlee.”

Wolders was born on Sept. 28, 1936, in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. The son of an actress, he came to the U.S. and enrolled at the University of Rochester, then studied acting at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York. He appeared on a 1965 episode of NBC’s Flipper and signed a contract with Universal.

Wolders played the French soldier Fouchet in the 1966 remake of Beau Geste that starred Guy Stockwell and was a military man who is slain in the Rock Hudson-George Peppard drama Tobruk (1967).

Wolders joined NBC’s lighthearted Laredo for its second and final season, 1966-67, as Erik Hunter, a rookie Texas Ranger from somewhere in Europe who wore colorful clothing. He once described his character as “a combination of Errol Flynn, 007 and Casanova.”

The handsome actor also played Paul Van Dillen, a charming ski instructor who has a superficial romance with Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) that draws all kinds of reactions from her co-workers, on a 1974 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

Wolders also appeared on series including The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Dan August, Peppard’s Banacek and Hudson’s McMillan & Wife and in a 1975 CBS telefilm, The Legendary Curse of the Hope Diamond, which marked his last acting appearance.

 

Filmography

 

Year     Title            Role            Notes

1965    Juliet of the Spirits            Corpse at Susy's party            Uncredited

1965    Flipper            Captain Johnson            Episode: "Flipper and the Spy"

1966    Run for Your Life            Marcel Lambert            Episode: "In Search of April"

1966    The John Forsythe Show   Mishka            Episode: "If I Were a Prince"

1966    Beau Geste            Fouchet          

1966–1967            Laredo            Erik Hunter  26 episodes

1967    Tobruk            Corporal Bruckner      

1967    Daniel Boone            Almaviva            Episode: "The Beaumarchais"

1967    The Man from U.N.C.L.E.            Andreas Petros            Episode: "The Man from THRUSH Affair"

1968    The Name of the Game   Dubrek            Episode: "The White Birch"

1969    The F.B.I.   Eric Linler            Episode: "The Doll Courier"

1970    Dan August  Gabe Redfern            Episode: "Murder by Proxy"

1970            Kemek            Sebastian        

1970            Bewitched       Clark            Episode: "The Corsican Cousins"

1971    Raid on Rommel            German Pilot            Uncredited

1973    Interval            Chris   

1974            Banacek          Tommy Forrest            Episode: "The Vanishing Chalice"

1974    The Mary Tyler Moore Show            Paul Van Dillen            Episode: "Not Just Another Pretty Face"

1974            McMillan & Wife            Ilia Astrov            Episode: "The Game of Survival"

1975    The Legendary Curse of the Hope Diamond            Hendrik          TV movie, (final film role)