Lifeline for Indian children as Hepburn's £500,000 black dress pays for new schools

You could not 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 in December, it prompted a flurry of publicity.

But this week, away from the cameras at a dirt-poor village just outside Calcutta, a new school was 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 14 more schools will be built across West Bengal state with the money raised by the dress.

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 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 Calcutta-based City of Joy Foundation, a charity set up to help India's poor by the French author, Dominique Lapierre. "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 that paid for the school.

"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 fashion house. 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 Bombay and Bangalore. While the cities are full of expensive new 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 with the money raised by the sale of the dress. His novel, City of Joy, is set in the slums of Calcutta, and he set up the foundation named after it to help India's poor.

Although Hepburn was descended from royalty, she endured extreme hardship as a child during the Second World War. She had an English father and a Dutch mother, and spent the war in the Netherlands. She was in Arnhem when it was bombed by the Allies in 1944 and saw several family members die in the famine that followed.

She took her work as a goodwill ambassador for Unicef very seriously, and in the late 1980s and early 1990s, she travelled on highly publicised missions around the world. More than 10 years after her death, she remains an icon, and polls continue to find her one of the most loved and admired stars.