She had stopped doing movies after 'Wait Until Dark' which was a success in 1967, she returned in 1976 with Robin and Marian and then very few other movies.
shareShe divorced in ´68 and remarried and had a kid in ´70. I remember somewhere she wanted to focus on having a family. She had a bunch of miscarriages throughout her career, Im sure that affected her mentally.
shareShe wanted to focused herself on her family.
shareBasically she wanted to spend time with her kids. I think it did her legacy a lot of good in the end, some might disagree. A lot of stars from 40's and 50's didn't go on to have a great 70's and ended up starring in a lot of rubbish, only Burt Lancaster and Marlon Brando went on to have great careers into their later years.
The films she returned to after her hiatus, I love Robin and Marion, one was awful in Bloodline, the other was a little gem in They All Laughed and one was meh in Always but she was basically a cameo in that. But she already left a pretty damn good legacy with her 50's and 60's work, not everything she did was great but even her misfire's in her prime were never that awful.
She was 39 in 1968, and then as now, good roles were *very* hard to find for women in their forties or older, especially leading roles. And coincidentally, she had a brand new husband and not many years of fertility left, if she chose to have another child, and to walk away from Hollywood to enjoy a lovely quiet life in Switzerland, well don't we all wish we could chuck our jobs and go live some place as gorgeous as Switzerland!
Nowadays, a lot of actresses chuck Hollywood in their forties and find something else to do with their lives, but in Hepburn's day most actresses began having trouble finding roles in their thirties. But Hepburn was so talented and beloved that she stayed on the A-list until she was 39, and even then, she only left because she had better things to do with her life than make movies. Of course all the movie geeks think it's a pity she didn't have the long and fabulous career of her fellow Hepburn, Katherine, but Audrey chose otherwise.
The main reason: she wanted to focus on her children. She often felt like making movies took her away from her son Sean and that this made her a bad mother. Approaching middle age, she also hoped to have more children, which she would when she married Andrea Dotti in 1969.
However, there were likely a few other factors that kept her away from movies as well, like the shift from Old Hollywood to New Hollywood in the late 60s, in which the kinds of movies that made her famous were falling out of style. While her great performances in 1967's Two for the Road and Wait Until Dark-- both departures from her usual type of movie and roles-- indicate she could have done great work in proposed New Hollywood projects such as The Exorcist (which she was tempted to take up), she chose not to, and often felt the roles offered her were too young or too "kinky" anyway. Part of the appeal of the Robin and Marian role was that it allowed her to play a woman her own age.
Also, she was plain exhausted after Wait Until Dark. She had worked without much in the way of a vacation for three movies straight and was going through a bitter divorce. While it was not her intention to quit movies, by 1967's end, she probably had massive burnout.