Ten of our favourite things about Julie Andrews
As the legendary actress and singer turns 90, we take a look back at her personal and professional life.
Image credit: Julie Andrews
As the legendary actress and singer turns 90, we take a look back at her personal and professional life.
To some, she will always be the young woman in both Mary Poppins and The Sound Of Music, transforming families while singing songs that are still stuck in our heads more than half a century later. But Dame Julie Andrews is actually about to celebrate her 90th birthday on 1 October.
It marks a milestone in a life in which she has gained countless showbiz accolades, three children, nine grandchildren, a great-grandchild and the small matter of a Damehood.
Originally named Julia Elizabeth Wells, she was born in 1935 in Surrey to Barbara and Ted Wells, who split up soon after World War II broke out. Andrews has said her childhood was a tough one but she found solace in acting. Her unique voice was soon noticed and she was performing professionally from the age of 12.
Since then, Andrews has cemented herself as one of the most beloved British stars of all time and she still continues to work, most notably voicing Lady Whistledown in Bridgerton in recent years. This month she’s also lending her legendary voice to a new audio adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by UK podcast network Noiser, which will be released as a 25-episode podcast on 30 September.
So, as we celebrate her 90th birthday, here are ten of our favourite things about everyone’s favourite onscreen nanny.
Performing for the-then King and Queen would have been a daunting task for most people, let alone a teenager. But Andrews took it all in her stride when she became the youngest solo artist to perform during the 1948 Royal Variety Performance at London’s Palladium.
Accompanied by a choir, the 13-year-old girl wowed the audience, which included King George VI and his wife Queen Elizabeth with her rendition of the national anthem. Backstage, the Queen, who later became the Queen Mother, went up to Andrews and told her, “You sang beautifully tonight”.
In 2000, Andrews met royalty again when she was awarded a Damehood for her contributions to acting. When she received her DBE, Queen Elizabeth II said, “I’ve been waiting a long time for you.”
Andrews' mother was a singer and pianist, while her stepfather was a tenor. She was sent to live with them in 1940 because her dad thought they would be able to provide better for her artistic training.
She has since said it was an unhappy home due to her stepfather’s violence and alcoholism but at least they decided to give her singing lessons to keep her occupied when school was closed.
“I hated the lessons but they discovered that I had this really freak, child prodigy voice and hit high notes and dogs would howl for miles around,” Andrews recalled. “The realisation that I could give the audience something didn’t come until much later.”
The beloved actress had a flower named after her, called the Julie Andrews hybrid tea rose, which is her favourite bloom and the one she knows how to look after the best.
“I love to prune my roses,” she explained. “That’s the one thing I really feel I do pretty well. Other things I usually, because I travel so much, leave to my gardeners who know what I love, but I do love to prune them, because you forget everything else. It’s like if you’re a painter, you can forget everything else while you’re doing it.
“I can’t say that I’m an enormously knowledgeable botanist, but I know what I love and I know how to make a garden. It depends on what the garden provides and what would suit it best. It’s just, hopefully, developing an eye and practicing a great deal. Go to your nurseries, learn. Get all the books you can get about growing roses.”
When the flying nanny returned to the big screen back in 2018, Emily Blunt took on the iconic role. However, Andrews was offered a cameo role but declined out of respect for Blunt.
“She immediately said no,” revealed director Rob Marshall. “She said, ‘This is Emily’s show and I want her to run with this. She should run with this. This is hers. I don’t want to be on top of that.’”
After the success of both Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, Andrews turned down any more nanny roles, saying: “I’ve done that.”
Andrews welcomed her first daughter, Emma, in 1962, during her marriage to costume designer Tony Walton. Despite being becoming a global superstar while Emma was still young, she was determined to give Emma an ordinary childhood.
“I knew it was really important for me to make Emma’s childhood as normal as possible, even though it was incredibly abnormal in many ways,” Andrews said.
After her first marriage ended, she wed Pink Panther director Blake Edwards in 1969 and after unsuccessful attempts to expand their family, they adopted daughters, Amy and Joanna, from Vietnam during the tumultuous mid-1970s.
“We wanted a child and weren’t being successful,” Andrews revealed. “Then Saigon began to fall, and within three months, we had another one.”
The family were based at a picturesque home in Gstaad, Switzerland, which Andrews has described as a peaceful haven “with duckies, piggies, and horses.”
She and Edwards remained married until his death at the age of 88 in 2010.
When she was shooting Mary Poppins, Andrews had cut her hair short so she could wear the wigs and she decided to keep her hair that way.
However, when playing Maria in The Sound of Music, her hair appeared too dark on camera, so the team decided she needed more highlights to get the Austrian authenticity.
“Unfortunately, there was a mistake in the colouring process, and I ended up with a bright orange mop,” she explained. “My hair had to be cut even shorter, and what was left of it was dyed pure blonde.
“As luck would have it, this gave me a more Austrian look.”
Despite playing Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady in 1956 – even winning a Tony award for her portrayal – Andrews was overlooked for the 1964 big screen adaptation as producer Jack L Warner reportedly didn’t think she was a big enough name.
Instead, he went for Audrey Hepburn, whose singing was dubbed by Marni Nixon as her voice wasn’t strong enough. Hepburn star later admitted she was reluctant to take on the role.
“I understood the dismay of people who had seen Julie on Broadway,” the late actress recalled. “Julie made that role her own, and for that reason, I didn’t want to do the film when it was first offered. I learned that if I turned it down, they would offer it to another movie actress. I thought I was entitled to do it as much as the third girl, so then I did accept.”
However, Andrews got the ultimate revenge when she won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins, while Hepburn didn’t even get a nomination despite My Fair Lady taking home eight Academy Awards.
After having vocal surgery to remove a cyst in 1997, she was left with permanent damage to her voice.
She revealed, “When I woke up from an operation to remove a cyst on my vocal cord, my singing voice was gone. I went into a depression. It felt like I’d lost my identity.”
Although her four-octave soprano voice has never returned, in 2004 Andrews appeared in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement in which she sang Your Crowning Glory. It was the first time since the surgery that she had sung in public or on screen, and she is said to have nailed the song on the first attempt, bringing tears to the eyes of the crew.
The song was specifically written to match her voice so she could do it. It was also agreed with director Garry Marshall that if she didn’t like it, the song would be cut from the movie.
“It’s a very sweet little song and it was very specially written to kind of cope with my voice,” she said. “It’s pitched very low, and I actually talk it more than sing it. I don’t want the audience to think that I am back singing because I’m not, alas.”
During the lockdown of 2020, Andrews and eldest daughter Emma launched their own podcast to champion diversity in children’s literacy.
Julie’s Library – in which they read out some of their favourite children’s books – was inspired by the pandemic as they thought “it would be such a help to parents and children who needed some kind of entertainment”.
The mother and daughter team have written more than 30 books together and the actress says working together is one of her greatest joys in life.
“You cannot imagine what a gift it is to me to work with my daughter,” she said. “I just enjoy it. It’s actually the thing keeping us most occupied these days.”
It may be the word that everyone who watches Mary Poppins struggles with, but Andrews found her opening line in that film a lot more difficult to say.
“It was so simple that I couldn’t think how to do it!” she said. “And Dick van Dyke, my partner on that particular shot, said something like, ‘You look very pretty today, Mary Poppins.’ And all I had to do was walk past him and say, ‘Do you really think so?’ And I thought to myself, ‘How? Open your mouth, Julie! Just say it!’”
Join the celebrations of 60 years of The Sound of Music with a visit to Salzburg, the backdrop for the Hollywood blockbuster film.
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