KEY POINTS:
You couldn't help feeling she would have approved. When the black Givenchy dress Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany's was sold for a staggering 467,200 pounds ($1.3 million) in December, it prompted a flurry of publicity.
But away from the cameras, at a dirt-poor village just outside
Kolkata, a new school has been opened - paid for entirely from the proceeds of the sale of the dress.
It will provide an education for 200 children in one of the most impoverished corners of India - and it is only the first of 15 schools that will be built across West Bengal state with the money.
The village of Bishnupur is a world away from the iconic image of Hepburn in the dress, peering in at the windows of Tiffany's in the empty, dawn-lit streets of New York.
But it is exactly the sort of place she chose to spend the later years of her life, helping the poor.
The actress so beautiful she was once memorably described as "living proof that God could still create perfection" gave up the glamour of Hollywood in the later years of her life, instead choosing to concentrate on humanitarian work as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef, the United Nations children's charity.
The proceeds from the sale of the dress have gone to the Kolkata-based City of Joy Foundation, a charity set up by the French author Dominique Lapierre to help India's poor.
"There are tears in my eyes," Mr Lapierre said when the dress sold for more than seven times its original estimate in December.
"I am absolutely dumbfounded to believe that a piece of cloth which belonged to such a magical actress will now enable me to buy bricks and cement to put the most destitute children in the world into schools."
At an inauguration ceremony for the school in Bishnupur, children sang in front of a portrait of Hepburn wearing the black dress.
"The actress devoted the last part of her life for destitutes and it is only befitting that the auction money be used for a great cause," Mr Lapierre said.
There were gasps and applause at the auction at Christie's in December, as the bidding moved relentlessly higher. The dress had been donated to Mr Lapierre's foundation by Givenchy, the famous fashion house that made it.
At the time the identity of the buyer, a telephone bidder, was a mystery. But it has since emerged that it was Givenchy, buying back its own dress.
Bishnupur is a very different place from the emerging India of Mumbai and Bangalore.
While the cities are full of expensive cars, as India's economy continues to grow at a ferocious pace, villages such as Bishnupur are getting left behind. They remain mired in poverty, and many village children never get the chance to go to school.
Mr Lapierre plans to build 15 schools across West Bengal state. His novel, City of Joy, is set in the slums of Kolkata, and he set up the foundation named after it to help India's poor.
Though she was descended from royalty, Hepburn endured extreme hardship as a child during World War II.
The child of an English father and a Dutch mother, she spent the war in the Netherlands.
She was under the Allied bombing of Arnhem, and saw several family members die in the famine that followed.
She took her work as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef intensely seriously, and in the late eighties and early nineties she made a series of highly publicised missions around the world.
More than 10 years after her death, she remains a legend, and polls continue to find her one of the most loved and admired stars of all time.
- INDEPENDENT
