Biography

Ella Van Heemstra was a Dutch noblewoman, the third daughter of the nobleman and politician Aarnoud van Heemstra. Her father served as the mayor of Arnhem in the 1910s, and as the Governor-General of Suriname from 1921 until 1928. The van Heemstra originated in the Frisian nobility, and the first individual member of the family was mentioned in the 1490s. The family coat of arms features a golden eagle.

During her childhood, Ella lived at the manor house of Huis Doorn. In 1919, the manor house was sold to the then-recently deposed German Emperor Wilhelm II. It served a his main residence from 1920 until his death in 1941. Also in 1919, Ella married the untitled nobleman Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford while still in her teens. The couple had two sons, but they divorced in 1925.

In 1926, Ella married the British diplomat Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston. Her new husband had served as the honorary British Consul in Semarang, Dutch East Indies during the early 1920s. Ruston later changed his surname to the more "aristocratic" double-barreled name Hepburn-Ruston, to reflect his supposed distant descent from the 16th-century Scottish admiral James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell (c. 1534-1578). The couple had a single daughter, Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston, who used the professional name "Audrey Hepburn" as an actress.

Ella divorced her second husband in 1939, and never remarried. At some point in the late 1950s or early 1960s, Ella moved to California to live closer to her only daughter, Audrey. In the early 1960s, Ella shared a house in Los Angeles with her friend Leonard Gershe. She moved to San Francisco, where she did volunteer work for soldiers coming back from the Vietnam War. Ella spend the last years of her life in her daughter's house in Tolochenaz, Switzerland. She died there in 1984.
- IMDb mini biography by: Dimos I