Audrey Hepburn: Rare stamp goes to auction

Audrey Hepburn: Rare stamp goes to auction

A collector wants to make profit after discovering a rare stamp that portrays the movie star Audrey Hepburn smoking . In fact it is one of a series that should have been incinerated by the German government.

In the year 2001, the government printed fourteen  million Audrey Hepburn stamps as part of a series thereby featuring movie stars including Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. The print run was destroyed after Sean Ferrer, Hepburn's son,  objected to the cigarette holder dangling from the mouth of the actress and refused to grant copyright.

However the Finance Ministry had already make a delivery of the advance copies of the Hepburn stamps to a famous newspaper for approval. Out of these 30 proof copies escaped destruction when an unknown employee pocketed them and used them for sending letters postmarked from Berlin.

A minimum bid of  30,000 (US$41,959) has been set for the stamp . Out of these only 5 copies are known to exist at its auction on Tuesday at Berlin's Kempinski Hotel Bristol.

"We can only guess that whoever took the Hepburn stamps from Deutsche Post didn't realize their value, thought they would save 55 cents and just used them on normal letters." The auctioneer Andreas Schlegel has told this to the reporters of a popular news agency.

The latest find is the fifth Hepburn stamp to surface since the year 2004. Schlegel said that the rest probably ended up where most stamps do: in the trash can.

One of the four other Hepburn stamps fetched 53,000 at an auction in Duesseldorf in the year 2005.

Ferreralso remarked that he hoped that the collector would use proceeds from the auction for supporting the cancer research or anti-smoking campaigns. His movie star mother passed away due to colon cancer in the year 1993.

The collector has got such a number of  stamps sheets as presents that he could not pinpoint where the Hepburn stamp came from, and preferred to remain anonymous.

Schlegel continued, "He's worried that if his picture is printed in the newspaper his friends will come to him and say, 'hey, you got that stamp from me,'"