Baroness Ella Van Heemstra

Ella Van Heemstra was a Dutch noblewoman and the third daughter of Aarnoud van Heemstra, a nobleman and politician. Her father served as mayor of Arnhem in the 1910s and as Governor-General of Suriname from 1921 to 1928. The van Heemstra family traces its origins to the Frisian nobility, with the first known family member mentioned in the 1490s. Their family coat of arms features a golden eagle. Ella spent her childhood at the manor house of Huis Doorn, which was sold to the deposed German Emperor Wilhelm II in 1919 and served as his main residence from 1920 until his death in 1941. In 1919, while still in her teens, Ella married the untitled nobleman Hendrik Gustaaf Adolf Quarles van Ufford. The couple had two sons but divorced in 1925. In 1926, she married British diplomat Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, who had previously served as honorary British Consul in Semarang, Dutch East Indies, in the early 1920s. Ruston later changed his surname to the double-barreled name Hepburn-Ruston, supposedly in recognition of distant descent from the 16th-century Scottish admiral James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. The couple had one daughter, Audrey Kathleen Hepburn-Ruston, who later became known professionally as Audrey Hepburn. Ella divorced Ruston in 1939 and did not remarry. In the late 1950s or early 1960s, she moved to California to live closer to her daughter. In the early 1960s, she shared a house in Los Angeles with her friend Leonard Gershe. She later moved to San Francisco, where she volunteered for soldiers returning from the Vietnam War. In her final years, she lived in her daughter's home in Tolochenaz, Switzerland, where she died in 1984.