Audrey Hepburn was first offered the role of Anne Frank. She refused it for three reasons. Firstly, she had decided to accept the role in
Green Mansions (1959). Secondly, she had lived in occupied Holland during the war and had seen the Nazis carry out street executions and watched as they herded Jews onto boxcars to carry them to concentration camps. She knew that making the film would bring back memories that were far too painful for her. However, thirdly, she was thirty and felt that she was too old to play a teenage character convincingly on screen.
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