Audrey served as Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations International Chidren's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), from 1988 until her untimely death in January 1993.

For most of its 50 years, UNICEF has benefited greatly from the support of internationally known personalities. Audrey served as Goodwill Ambassador for United Nations International Chidren's Emergency Fund (UNICEF), from 1988 until her untimely death in January 1993. Through her work with UNICEF, she used her image and the great interest people had in her to attract world attention to her cause, but also of repaying the United Nations for rescuing her from starvation in 1945 Holland. Audrey's movie career took a back seat to her work for UNICEF which proved more meaningful to her than restarting her acting career. Audrey represented the agency in many capacities, not only appearing at public occasions to support the good cause of UNICEF but also traveling widely to the world's trouble spots to assess the situation of children.

Audrey's deeply sensitive appeals for children while visiting Ethiopia, Somalia and the Sudan cannot be forgotten. In 1993, the Academy posthumously gave Ms. Hepburn the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for her work as Unicef's ambassador to the world's children, a well deserved tribute to an exceptionally beautiful woman.

The impressive images of Audrey Hepburn in the Third World would leave the rest of the world with the impression that she made dozens of UNICEF pilgrimages, although over four years of her work for the organization, there were just eight missions - but of increasingly profound impact.