By 1944, Hepburn had become a proficient ballerina. She secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch resistance. She later said, "The best audience I ever had made not a single sound at the end of my performances".^[11] After the Allied landing on D-Day, living conditions grew worse, and Arnhem was subsequently devastated by Allied artillery fire that was part of Operation Market Garden. During the Dutch famine that followed, over the winter of 1944, the Germans blocked the resupply routes of Dutch people's already limited food and fuel supplies as retaliation for railway strikes that were held to hinder the German occupation. People starved and froze to death in the streets. Hepburn and many others resorted to making flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits.^[6][12]

Suffering from malnutrition, Hepburn developed acute anemia, respiratory problems, and edema.^[13]

In 1992, when Hepburn returned to Switzerland from her visit to Somalia, she began to feel abdominal pains. (She died 4 months later: Jan 20, 1993 at age 63)

She went to specialists and received inconclusive results, so she decided to have it examined while on a trip to Los Angeles in October.

On 1 November, doctors performed a laparoscopy and discovered abdominal cancer that had spread from her appendix.^[59] It had grown slowly over several years, and metastasised not as a tumour, but as a thin coating over her small intestine. The doctors performed surgery and then put Hepburn through 5-fluorouracil Leucovorin chemotherapy.^[60] A few days later, she had an obstruction. Medication was not enough to dull the pain, so on 1 December, she underwent surgery a second time. After one hour, the surgeon decided that the cancer had spread too far and could not be removed.