Dame Julie Elizabeth Andrews,
DBE (born
Julia
Elizabeth Wells on 1 October 1935) is a British film and
stage actress, singer, and author. She is the recipient of
Golden Globe,
Emmy,
Grammy,
BAFTA,
People's Choice Award,
Theatre World Award,
Screen Actors Guild and
Academy Award honours.
Andrews was a former
British child actress and singer who made her Broadway
debut in
1954 with The Boy Friend,
and rose to prominence starring in other musicals such as
My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in musical films such as Mary Poppins (1964) and
The Sound of
Music (1965): the roles for which she is still
best-known. Her voice spanned four
octaves until it was damaged by a throat operation in
1998.
Andrews had a major revival of her film career in the 2000s, in
family films such as
The
Princess Diaries (2001), its sequel
The Princess Diaries 2:
Royal Engagement (2004), and the
Shrek animated films (2004–2007).
In 2003 Andrews
revisited her first Broadway success, this time as a stage
director, with a revival of The Boy
Friend at the Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, New
York
(and later at the Goodspeed Opera House
, in East Haddam, Connecticut
in 2005).
Andrews is also an author of children's books, and in 2008 she
published an autobiography,
Home: A Memoir of My Early
Years.
Early life
Andrews
was born Julia Elizabeth Wells on 1 October 1935
in Walton-on-Thames
, Surrey
, England
. Her
mother, Barbara Wells (née Morris), was married to Edward C. "Ted"
Wells, a teacher of metal and woodworking, but Julie was conceived
as a result of an affair her mother had with a family friend.
With the outbreak of World War II, Barbara and Ted Wells went their
separate ways. Ted Wells assisted with evacuating children to
Surrey during
the Blitz while Barbara
joined Ted Andrews in entertaining the troops through the good
offices of the
Entertainments
National Service Association (ENSA).
Barbara and Ted Wells
were soon divorced; they both remarried—Barbara to Ted Andrews in
1939, and Ted Wells to a former hairstylist working a lathe at a
war factory that employed them both in Hinchley Wood
, Surrey.
Julia Wells lived briefly with her father and her brother John
Wells in Surrey. About 1940, her father sent her to live with her
mother and stepfather, who (her father felt) would be better able
to provide for his talented daughter's artistic training. According
to her 2008 autobiography "Home", while Julia had been used to
calling Ted Andrews "Uncle Ted", her mother suggested it would be
more appropriate to refer to her stepfather as "Pop", while her
father remained "Dad" or "Daddy" to her. Julia disliked this
change.
The Andrews family was "very poor and we lived in a bad slum area
of London", Andrews recalled, adding, "That was a very black period
in my life." In addition, according to Andrews's 2008 memoir, her
mother and stepfather were alcoholics. Ted physically abused
Julie's brother and twice, while drunk, made advances on his
stepdaughter, resulting in Julie's putting a lock on her door.
But, as
the stage career of Ted and Barbara Andrews improved, they were
able to afford to move to better surroundings, first to Beckenham
and then, as the war ended, back to Andrews' home
town of Walton-on-Thames. The Andrews' took up residence at
The Old Meuse, a house where Andrews' maternal grandmother happened
to have served as a maid.
Andrews'
father sponsored lessons for his daughter, first at the Cone-Ripman
School
, an independent arts educational school in London,
then with the famous concert soprano and voice instructor Lilian Stiles-Allen. "She had an
enormous influence on me", Andrews said of Stiles-Allen, adding,
"She was my third mother -- I've got more mothers and fathers than
anyone in the world." In her 2008 autobiography
Home,
Andrews denies having
perfect pitch.
After Cone-Ripman School, Andrews continued her academic education
at the nearby
Woodbrook
School, a local state school in Beckenham.
Andrews performed spontaneously and unbilled on stage with her
parents for about two years beginning in 1945. "Then came the day
when I was told I must go to bed in the afternoon because I was
going to be allowed to sing with Mummy and Pop in the evening",
Andrews explained. She would stand on a beer crate to reach the
microphone and sing while her mother played piano, sometimes a solo
or as a duet with her stepfather. "It must have been ghastly, but
it seemed to go down all right."
Andrews got her big break when her stepfather introduced her to
Val Parnell, whose
Moss Empires controlled prominent venues in
London.
Andrews made her professional solo debut at
the London
Hippodrome
singing the difficult aria "Je Suis Titania" from
Mignon as part of a musical revue
called "Starlight Roof" on 22 October 1947. She played the
Hippodrome for one year.. Andrews recalled "Starlight Roof" saying,
"There was this wonderful American entertainer and comedian,
Wally Boag, who made balloon animals. He
would say, 'Is there any little girl or boy in the audience who
would like one of these?' And I would rush up onstage and say, 'I'd
like one, please.' And then he would chat to me and I'd tell him I
sang... I was fortunate in that I absolutely stopped the show cold.
I mean, the audience went crazy."
On 1
November 1948, Andrews became the youngest solo performer ever to
be seen in a Royal Command
Variety Performance, at the London Palladium
, where she performed along with Danny Kaye, the Nicholas Brothers and the comedy team
George and Bert Bernard for
members of King George VI's family.
Andrews followed her parents into radio and television. She
reportedly made her television debut on the BBC program
RadiOlympia Showtime on 8 October 1949. She garnered
considerable fame throughout the United Kingdom for her work on the
BBC radio comedy show
Educating
Archie; she was a cast member from 1950 to 1952.
Andrews
appeared on West End
Theatre
at the London Casino
, where she played one year each as Princess Badroulbadour in
Aladdin and the egg in
Humpty Dumpty. She
also appeared on provincial stages across United Kingdom in
Jack and the Beanstalk and
Little Red Riding
Hood, as well as starring as the lead role in
Cinderella.
At the age of 14, in 1950, Andrews was asked to sing at a party,
and it was then that she learned that Ted Wells was not her
biological father.
1954–1962: Early career
On 30 September 1954, on the eve of her 19th birthday, Andrews made
her Broadway debut portraying "Polly Browne" in the already highly
successful London musical
The Boy
Friend. To the critics, Andrews was the stand-out
performer in the show. In November 1955, Andrews was signed to
appear with
Bing Crosby in what is
regarded as the first made-for-television movie,
High Tor.
Andrews auditioned for a part in the
Richard Rodgers musical
Pipe Dream. Although Rodgers
wanted her for
Pipe Dream, he advised her to take the part
in the
Frederick Loewe and
Alan Jay Lerner musical
My Fair Lady if it was offered to her. In
1956, she appeared in
My Fair Lady as
Eliza Doolittle to
Rex Harrison's
Henry
Higgins. Rodgers was so impressed with Andrews' talent that,
concurrent with her run in
My Fair Lady, she was featured
in the
Rodgers and
Hammerstein television musical,
Cinderella.
Cinderella was
broadcast live on
CBS on 31 March 1957, under
the musical direction of
Alfredo
Antonini and attracted an estimated 107 million viewers.
Andrews married the
set designer Tony Walton on 10 May 1959 in Weybridge, Surrey.
They had
first met in 1948 when Andrews was appearing at the London Casino in the show Humpty Dumpty. The
couple filed for a divorce on November 14, 1967.
Between 1958 and 1962, she appeared on such specials as CBS-TV's
The Fabulous Fifties and NBC-TV's
The Broadway of
Lerner & Loewe. In addition to guest starring on
The Ed Sullivan Show,
she also appeared on
The
Dinah Shore Chevy Show,
What's My Line?,
The Jack Benny Program,
The Bell Telephone
Hour, and
The Garry
Moore Show.
In June, 1962, Andrews co-starred in a CBS
special with Carol Burnett which was
taped at Carnegie
Hall
in New York.
In 1960, Lerner and Loewe again cast her in a period musical, as
Queen Guinevere in
Camelot, with
Richard Burton and newcomer
Robert Goulet. Meanwhile, movie studio head
Jack Warner decided Andrews lacked
sufficient name recognition for her casting in the film version of
My Fair Lady; Eliza was played by the established film
actress
Audrey Hepburn instead. As
Warner later recalled, the decision was easy. "In my business I
have to know who brings people and their money to a movie theatre
box office. Audrey Hepburn had never made a financial flop."
1963–1967: Career peak
Andrews played the title role in
Disney's
Mary Poppins.
Walt Disney had seen a performance of
Camelot and thought Andrews would
be perfect for the role of a British nanny who is "practically
perfect in every possible way!" Andrews initially declined due to
pregnancy, but Disney politely insisted, saying, "We'll wait for
you" (confirmed by 40th anniversary Mary Poppins DVD Walt Disney
Pictures 2004). Andrews and her husband headed back to the United
Kingdom in September 1962 to await the birth of daughter Emma
Katherine Walton, who was born in London two months later. Andrews
and family returned to America in 1963 and began the film.
As a result of her performance in
Mary Poppins, Andrews
won the 1964
Academy
Award for Best Actress and the 1965
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or
Comedy. She and her
Mary Poppins co-stars also won the
1965
Grammy
Award for Best Album for Children. As a measure of "sweet
revenge," as
Poppins songwriter
Richard M. Sherman put it, Andrews closed her
acceptance speech at the Golden Globes by saying, "And, finally, my
thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie, and who made all this
possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner."
In 1964, she appeared opposite
James
Garner in
The
Americanization of Emily (1964), which she has described
as her favourite film. In 1966, Andrews won her second
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or
Comedy and was nominated for the 1965
Academy Award for Best
Actress for her role as
Maria von
Trapp in
The Sound of
Music.
After completing
The Sound Of Music, Andrews appeared as a
guest star on the NBC-TV variety series
The Andy Williams
Show, which gained her an Emmy nomination. She followed this
television appearance with an Emmy Award-winning color special,
The Julie Andrews Show, which featured
Gene Kelly and
The New Christy Minstrels as
guests. It aired on NBC-TV in November 1965.
In 1966, Andrews starred with
Paul
Newman in the
Hitchcock
thriller
Torn Curtain. By the
end of 1967, Andrews had appeared in the television special,
Cinderella; the
biggest Broadway musical of its time,
My Fair Lady; the largest-selling
long-playing album, the original cast recording of
My Fair Lady; the biggest hit in Disney's
history,
Mary Poppins;
the highest grossing movie of 1966,
Hawaii ; the biggest and second biggest
hits in Universal's history,
Thoroughly Modern Millie and
Torn Curtain; and the biggest
hit in 20th Century Fox's history
The Sound of Music.
1968–2001: Mid-career
Andrews appeared in
Star!, a
1968 biopic of
Gertrude Lawrence,
and
Darling Lili (1970),
co-starring
Rock Hudson and directed by
her second husband,
Blake Edwards
(they married in 1969). She made only two other films in the 1970s,
The Tamarind Seed
and
10.
Together Edwards and Andrews adopted two daughters; Amy in 1974 and
Joanna in 1975. Edwards already had another daughter, Jennifer, and
a son Geoffrey who were 3 and 5 years older than Emma, Andrews'
first daughter.
Andrews continued working on television. In 1969, she shared the
spotlight with singer
Harry
Belafonte for an NBC-TV special,
An Evening with Julie
Andrews and Harry Belafonte. In 1971, she appeared as a guest
for the Grand Opening Special of Walt Disney World and that same
year, she and Carol Burnett headlined a CBS special,
Julie and
Carol At Lincoln Center.
In 1972–73, Andrews starred in her own television variety series,
The Julie Andrews
Hour, on the
ABC network. The show won
seven
Emmy Awards, but was cancelled
after one season. Between 1973 and 1975, Andrews continued her
association with ABC by headlining five variety specials for the
network. She then guest-starred on
The Muppet Show in 1977. Andrews again
appeared with the Muppets on a CBS-TV special, Julie Andrews: One
Step Into Spring, which aired in March, 1978.
In 1981, she appeared in Blake Edwards's
S.O.B. (1981), in which she played
Sally Miles, a character who agrees to "show my boobies" in a scene
in the film-within-a-film.
In 1983,
Andrews was chosen as the Hasty Pudding Woman of the
Year by the Harvard University
theatrical society. The roles of Victoria
Grant and Count Victor Grezhinski in the film
Victor/Victoria earned Andrews the 1983
Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or
Comedy, as well as a nomination for the 1982
Academy Award for Best
Actress, her third Oscar nomination.
In December 1987, Andrews starred in an ABC holiday special,
Julie Andrews: The Sound Of Christmas, which won five Emmy
Awards. Two years later, she was reunited for the third time with
Carol Burnett for a variety special which aired on ABC in December,
1989.
In 1991, Andrews made her television dramatic debut in the ABC
made-for-TV movie,
Our Sons,
co-starring
Ann-Margret.
In the summer of 1992, she starred in her first television sitcom,
Julie, which aired on
ABC and co-starred
James Farentino. In December, 1992, Andrews
hosted the
NBC holiday special,
Christmas In
Washington.
In 1993,
she starred in a limited run at the Manhattan
Theatre Club
, of the American premiere of Stephen Sondheim's revue, Putting It Together. Between
1994 and 1995, Andrews recorded two solo albums - the first saluted
the music of Richard Rodgers and the second paid tribute to the
words of Alan Jay Lerner. In 1995, she starred in the stage musical
version of
Victor/Victoria. It was her
first appearance in a Broadway show in 35 years. Opening on
Broadway on 25 October 1995 at the
Marquis Theatre, it later went on the road
on a world tour. When she was the only
Tony
Award nominee for the production, she declined the nomination,
saying that she could not accept because she felt the entire
production was snubbed.
Andrews was forced to quit the show towards the end of the Broadway
run in 1997, when she developed vocal problems. She subsequently
underwent surgery to remove non-cancerous
nodules from her throat and was left
unable to sing. In 1999, Andrews filed a medical malpractice
lawsuit against the doctors at New York's
Mount Sinai Hospital,
including Scott Kessler, who had operated on her throat.
Originally, the doctors assured Andrews that she should regain her
voice within six weeks, but Andrews' stepdaughter
Jennifer Edwards said in 1999 "it's been
two years, and it [her singing voice] still hasn't returned."
Later that year, Andrews was reunited with James Garner for the CBS
made-for-TV movie,
One Special Night, which aired in
November 1999.
In the 2000 New Year's Honours, she was made a Dame Commander of
the
Order of the British
Empire (DBE). She also appears at #59 on the 2002 List of
"
100 Greatest Britons"
sponsored by the
BBC and chosen by the
public.
In 2001, Andrews received
Kennedy
Center Honors. The same year, she reunited with
Sound of
Music co-star
Christopher
Plummer in a live television performance of
On Golden Pond (an
adaptation of
the 1979
play).
2001–present: Career revival
In 2001, Andrews appeared in
The Princess Diaries, her
first Disney film since 1964's
Mary Poppins. She starred
as Queen Clarisse Marie Renaldi and reprised the role in a sequel,
The
Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004). In
The
Princess Diaries 2, Andrews sang on film for the first time
since her throat surgery. The song, "Your Crowning Glory", was set
in a limited range of an octave to accommodate Andrews' recovering
voice. The film's music supervisor Dawn Soler recalled that Andrews
"nailed the song on the first take. I looked around and I saw grips
with tears in their eyes."
Andrews
continued her association with Disney when she appeared as Nanny in
two 2003 made-for-television movies based on the Eloise books, a series of children's books by
Kay Thompson about a child who lives in
the Plaza
Hotel
in New York City. Eloise at the Plaza premiered in
April 2003, and
Eloise at
Christmastime was broadcast in November 2003. The same
year, Andrews made her debut as a theatre director, directing a
revival of
The Boy Friend, the musical in which she made
her 1954 Broadway debut, at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor,
New York.
Her production, which featured costume and
scenic design by her former husband Tony
Walton, was remounted at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2005 and went on a national tour in
2006.
From 2005
to 2006, Andrews served as the Official Ambassador for Disneyland
's 18-month-long, 50th anniversary celebration, the
"Happiest Homecoming on
Earth," travelling to promote the celebration and recording
narration or appearing at several events at the park.
In 2004, Andrews performed the voice of
Queen Lillian in the animated
blockbuster
Shrek 2 (2004),
reprising the role for its sequel,
Shrek the Third (2007). Later in 2007,
she narrated
Enchanted, a
live-action Disney musical comedy that both poked fun and paid
homage to classic Disney films such as
Mary Poppins.
In
January 2007, she was honoured with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the
Screen Actors Guild's awards,
and stated that her goals included continuing to direct for the
stage, and possibly to produce her own Broadway musical
. She published
Home: A Memoir of My Early
Years, which she characterised as "part one" of her
autobiography, on 1 April 2008.
Home chronicles her early
years in UK's
music hall circuit and ends
in 1962 with her winning the role of Mary Poppins. For a Walt
Disney video release she again portrayed Mary Poppins and narrated
the story of
The Cat That Looked at a King in 2004.
In July through early August 2008, Andrews hosted
Julie
Andrews' The Gift of Music, a short tour of the United States
where she sang various
Rodgers
and Hammerstein songs and symphonised her recently published
book,
Simeon's Gift. These were the first public singing
performances in a dozen years, due to her failed vocal cord
surgery.
On May 8,
2009, Andrews received the honorary George and Ira Gershwin Award
for Lifetime Achievement in Music at the annual UCLA Spring Sing competition in Pauley
Pavilion
.
Receiving the award, she remarked, "Go Bruins. Beat 'SC ... strike
up the band to celebrate every one of those victories."
On
November 25, 2009, it was announced that Andrews will be singing in
a concert at The O2 Arena 
on May 8, 2010. Accompanied by the
Royal Philharmonic Orchestra
and an ensemble of five performers, she will sing favourites from
her stage and film career.
Status as a gay and lesbian icon
Julie Andrews has long had something of a dual image, being both a
family-friendly icon and an
icon for gays and
lesbians. According to cultural studies scholar Brett Farmer,
she "... is notable as one of the few divas to enjoy a parallel
popularization across both gay and lesbian reading formations."
Andrews herself has acknowledged her strange status, commenting
that "I'm that odd mixture of, on the one hand, being a gay icon
and, on the other, having grandmas and parents grateful I'm around
to be a babysitter for their kids..." She has frequently appeared
as a formative presence and signifier in narratives of homosexual
identity, notably in
The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality,
and the Mystery of Desire,
Does Freddy Dance and
Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies.
Recent gender/cultural studies writers such as Stacy Wolf and Peter
Kemp have argued for a different reading of the image projected by
her two most famous films,
Mary Poppins and
The Sound
of Music, as that of a transgressive, subversive and
life-changing force, rather than a sugary nanny committed to
keeping the traditional status quo. Stacy Wolf's book,
A
Problem Like Maria—Gender and Sexuality in the American
Musical, analyzes Andrews' unique performance style (alongside
stars such as Mary Martin and Ethel Merman) and devotes an entire
chapter to
The Sound of Music, studying it within a
queer feminist
context, and shedding light on its importance among lesbian
spectators.
Acting career
Films
Television appearances
Stage appearances
Honours
Chart Sources:
Bibliography
Andrews has published books under her name as well as the pen names
Julie Andrews Edwards and Julie Edwards.
- Andrews, Julie. Home: A Memoir of My Early
Years (2008) Hyperion ISBN 0786865652
- Edwards, Julie Andrews (Author) and Johanna Westerman
(Illustrator). Mandy. HarperTrophy 1989. ISBN
0064402967.
- Edwards, Julie. The Last of the Really Great
Whangdoodles. New York: Harper and Row. 1974. ISBN
000184461X.
- Edwards, Julie Andrews. Little
Bo: The Story of Bonnie Boadicea. Hyperion, 1999. ISBN
0-7868-0514-5. (several others in this series.)
- Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Dumpy the
Dumptruck. Hyperion, 2000. ISBN 0-7868-0609-5. (several
others in the Dumpy series.)
- Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, (Authors).
Gennady Spirin (Illustrator). Simeon's
Gift. 2003. ISBN 0-06-008914-8.
- Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Dragon:
Hound of Honor. HarperTrophy, 2005. ISBN
0-06-057121-7.
- Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton (Authors) and
Tony Walton (Illustrator). The Great
American Mousical. HarperTrophy, 2006. ISBN
0-06-057918-8.
- Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Thanks to
You: Wisdom from Mother and Child. Julie Andrews
Collection, 2007. ISBN 0061240028.
References
- Julie Andrews. Reel Classics.
- Dame Julie: The sound of music. 31
December 1999. Retrieved 29 January 2007.
- Julie Andrews: my secret father - Times
Online
- Spindle, Les. Julie Andrews: A
Bio-Bibliography. Greenwood Press (1989)] ISBN 0313262233.
pp. 1-2.
- Windeler (1970), pp 20-21
- March 30, 2008 NY Times review of
Home
- Interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, aired April 7, 2008
- Windeler (1970), pp 22-23
- Windeler (1970), pp 23-24
- Spindle, p. 2, suggests that Andrews began a few years of stage
work with her parents in 1946.
- Windeler (1970), pp 24-26
- Boag, Wally and Sands, Gene. Wally Boag, Clown Prince of
Disneyland, Disney Enterprises, Inc. 2009, p.39
- Windeler (1970), p. 26. "Julie, who was described in the
official announcement 14 October as 'A 13-year-old coloratura
soprano with the voice of an adult,' was the youngest solo
performer ever chosen to perform before royalty at the
Palladium."
- Spindle, p. 3
- Windeler (1970), pp 26-27.
- Ruhlmann, William. Julie Andrews
Biography. All-Music Guide article from Legacy
Recordings.
- [">Windeler (1970), pp 20-21
- Spindle, pp. 4-5.
- Windeler, pp. 41-42.
- Gans, Andrew. "Julie Andrews 'Cinderella' to Air on
PBS in December". Playbill News. 6 October 2004.
- Haberman, Irving. "The Theatre World Brings A Few Musical and a
Stage Success to Television This Week". The New York
Times, 31 March 1957.
- Spindle, p. 14.
- Mary Poppins 40th Anniversary Edition DVD.
- Blank, Ed. Andrews as Maria a result of 'happy
circumstances' . Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. 17 November
2005.
- [1]
- Times Online's 2005 review of Andrews'
career
- http://www.hastypudding.org/pages/show/pastmoywoy.shtml
- Julie Andrews: A Life Of Achievements.
CBS News. 26 January
2007. Retrieved 29 January 2007.
- [2] Julieandrews.co.uk Retrieved on
04-19-07.
- Andrews sues over lost voice.
BBC News. 15 December
1999. Retrieved 29 January 2007.
- Singing comeback for Dame Julie. 19
March 2004. Retrieved 10 February 2008.
- Amazon.com listing. Retrieved on 2007-12-16.
- http://www.julieandrewscollection.com/sitev2/promo.php
- http://cbs2.com/video/?id=72185@kcbs.dayport.com
- Dame Julie Andrews to make UK stage return
BBC News . Retrieved on 2009-11-25.
- Farmer, Brett. "Julie Andrews Made Me Gay." Camera Obscura. 22:
2, 2007: 134-143
- Brockes, Emma: "Thoroughly Modern Julie", The
Guardian, Oct 14, 2004
- Kostenbaum, Wayne. The Queen's Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and
the Mystery of Desire. (New York: Poseidon, 1993)
- Scanlan, Dick. Does Freddy Dance (Boston: Alyson, 1995)
- Horrigan, Patrick E. Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the
Movies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1999)
- Kemp, Peter. "How Do You Solve a 'Problem' Like Maria von
Poppins," in Musicals--Hollywood and Beyond, ed. Bill Marshall and
Robynn Stilwell (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000)
- Wolf, Stacy. A Problem Like Maria: Gender and Sexuality in the
American Musical (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
2002)
- Spindle, pp. 123-29
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