Julie Andrews at 90: Her five best films and the stories behind them
Dame Julie Andrews, who turns 90 on October 1, is not so much a national treasure as the Bank of England. Loved as the embodiment of wholesomeness, she is practically perfect in every way and as enigmatic as a nanny from outer space. She is amongst the most recognised, respected and loved actors this country has ever produced, but when it comes to British icons, only the late Queen Elizabeth remained as consistently demure about her inner life for longer.
As a child performer working in the music halls of a bombed-out London in the late 1940s, she had to contend with her parents' divorce, her alcoholic mother's remarriage to her stepfather who, according to Andrews's own memoirs, was a drunk who attempted to sexually assault her. She later discovered her biological father was a family friend her mother had an affair with in 1935. "I felt a little special," she said. "And singing gave me an identity."
Julie Andrews: 'The English rose with the crystal-clear voice who spent a lifetime being unknowable' - Bettmann
Andrews was the biggest Hollywood star of 1964 and 1965, yet after Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music , she struggled to define what kind of actress she could become. The results were inconsistent if entertaining. From screwball comedies to thrillers, and concluding as the grand dame of modern animated classics such as the Shrek franchise, Andrews remains a riddle: the English rose with the crystal-clear voice who spent a lifetime being unknowable.
Can the stories behind her biggest films reveal any clues to the "real" person behind the unfailingly professional star who has charmed five successive generations?
Mary Poppins, 1964
Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins, the most successful film of 1964 - Moviepix
After a stint on Broadway, Andrews made her name on stage as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady in 1956 and then as Guinevere in Camelot . In 1962, the same year that Decca turned down The Beatles, studio mogul Jack Warner blocked her casting for the film version of My Fair Lady in favour of Audrey Hepburn. Warner Bros's loss turned out to be Walt Disney's gain. Andrews's screen debut was the most successful film of 1964.
She was spotted performing an excerpt from Camelot by the songwriting Sherman brothers on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1961, and they recommended her to Disney. Several other actresses had been proposed for Poppins, with a previous front-runner being Bette Davis, a bizarre prospect considering she was 55 at the time rather than a 29-year-old from Walton-on-Thames.
Audrey Hepburn would replace Andrews in the film version of My Fair Lady. Here they are pictured at the Oscars in 1965
PL Travers, who wrote the Mary Poppins books, spent the year of production in 1963 as a consultant, driving everyone at the studio half-mad with her demands and with Andrews she was no less caustic. All Andrews recalls of their one meeting was that Travers said she "had the nose for it". Andrews's co-star Dick van Dyke said: "She hated Julie and she hated me."
Other than Van Dyke's accent as cockney composite Bert (for which he blames Irish voice coach J Pat O'Malley), Mary Poppins comes close to perfection, not that Van Dyke didn't walk – or dance – on thin ice throughout, turning up on set each day with a severe hangover during a period of alcoholism and depression.
There is a kitchen-sink – as in "everything but the" – element to Mary Poppins, with its innovative mix of live action and animation, balletic choreography, uplifting tunes and sentimental story of family reconciliation that always steers just the right side of saccharine. Above it all flies Andrews, aloof but alluring.
Her first role may be the most representative of Andrews's career. Even her then husband Tony Walton, who designed the sets and costumes, said to her, "I think Mary Poppins has a kind of secret life [...] Very formal on the outside and a little bit wicked on the inside."
Where to watch: streaming on Disney+
The Sound Of Music, 1965
Julie Andrews and Christopher Plummer are flanked by the children of the Von Trapp family in The Sound of Music - Bettmann
Mary Poppins was released while Andrews was filming The Sound of Music in the summer of 1964, so the expectation that her second film could be even bigger was palpable.
Andrews's personal investment in the roles she defined – Eliza Doolittle on stage and Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp in film – was compounded by an odd set of coincidences. Three of the geese in Mary Poppins were voiced by Marni Nixon, who then turned up as Sister Sophia in Maria's Austrian convent in The Sound of Music . Nixon had provided the singing voice for Hepburn's Eliza in the film version of My Fair Lady (Hepburn having been judged not to have the pipes to pull it off).
There were concerns Andrews would take a dim view of working alongside a woman who had been involved in what she still felt was her great professional tragedy, but instead she walked up to Nixon on set and said, "Marni, I'm such a fan of yours", which was seen to be as much a dig at Hepburn's voice as it was an icebreaker.
More than 300,000 tourists visit Salzburg every year just to visit locations where The Sound Of Music was filmed. Many are taken to the mountaintop to re-enact the famous opening scene, the last to be shot. They used a helicopter to descend on Andrews, but as the aircraft circled around her, the downdraft knocked her flat to the ground. Eventually she was able to complete the scene standing up.
In February 1965, one month before The Sound Of Music was released and went on to become the highest ever grossing film of the time, Andrews won the Golden Globe for Best Actress as Mary Poppins, thanking Jack Warner for his unwitting role in her success. A month later she won the Oscar.
Where to watch: streaming on BBC iPlayer and Disney+
Thoroughly Modern Millie, 1967
Julie Andrews portrays a flapper of the 1920s who goes to New York to find a husband - Bettmann
Post-Salzburg Andrews appeared in director George Roy Hill's Hawaii , based on an epic historical novel about missionaries that did not live up to its epic aspirations. She was also in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain , who by that point was rather like Woody Allen, in that he could persuade big stars to appear in his films even when they had stopped being any good.
Thoroughly Modern Millie was a hit in 1967, but it's a bit like The Godfather 3 to Andrews's previous two films. In the opening sequence she belts out "Goodbye, good-goodie girl, I'm changing and how", but if it was a statement of intent it wasn't very convincing.
The songs are fun, while the plot is goofy with Shakespeare-style disguised lovers and Andrews at the centre of it all, a 1920s New York flapper making Fleabag-style looks at the camera. The decidedly un-PC portrayal of Chinese characters kidnapping women into "white slavery" is why – unlike her previous hits – it is rarely seen on television.
Thoroughly Modern Millie, released in 1967, was a cute comparison between the Roaring Twenties and Swinging Sixties - Shutterstock
In 1967 it might have seemed a cute comparison between the Roaring Twenties and Swinging Sixties, but this was also the year the studio system really began to fall apart, to be replaced by the "New Hollywood" ushered in by Bonnie & Clyde and later Easy Rider . Like a lot of other musicals of the period, it felt too old-school "showbiz" in comparison.
The sense of the tectonic plates shifting was heightened when Andrews made a biography of Gertrude Lawrence called Star! in 1968, her first flop and an ominous sign of things to come. "My own career was in decline," she said. "I had been so successful and any career is like a graph – it goes up and down and mine was on the wane so it was time to knock that old image of myself."
Where to watch: available to buy on DVD
10, 1979
When Blake Edwards, the director of Breakfast At Tiffany's and The Pink Panther , began dating Andrews in around 1967, he told a friend he assumed Andrews was so pure she had "lilacs for pubic hair". The next time she visited his house, the story goes, she was carrying a lilac bush. He would routinely send her lilacs as a reminder of their courtship.
Her next film, Darling Lili , was the first of seven she made with Edwards, who became her second husband in 1969. It was a box office disaster in 1970 and the failure was something Edwards would stew on for a decade.
Julie Andrews and Blake Edwards on location filming Darling Lili in Paris, 1968 - Ron Galella Collection
Other than cameos and minor roles, she worked with Edwards almost exclusively for 16 years, and for all that time batted off questions about her trying to challenge the public perception of her as the prim and pure Englishwoman. Every interviewer asked the same question: "Is this an attempt to get away from Mary Poppins and Maria?" and was answered the same way: "I'd like to be allowed to do other things." Andrews is so uncomfortable in interviews – often rehashing the same vanilla anecdotes – it's hard to know whether she is bored, irritated or just obsessively guarded. The mask never slips.
Bo Derek, Dudley Moore and Julie Andrews in 10 - Alamy
The one Edwards film in which she seems at ease is 1979's 10 , as Dudley Moore's long-suffering girlfriend Samantha. Despite the farcical plot about a middle-aged composer driven to distraction by an impossibly beautiful young woman, Andrews shows the kind of acting she rarely got to flex, with convincing bitterness and ennui. The pair's acidic exchange in bed after she catches him spying on their orgy-loving Beverly Hills neighbour may be her finest post-Von Trapp scene.
10 allows her to be genuinely sultry and in so doing she finally achieves her long-stated aim. There are no traces of Mary or Maria. Samantha's sense of longing is so seductive, it's tempting to ponder why Moore would spend the film chasing Bo Derek around a Mexican beach when he could go home to the most compelling version of Julie Andrews that ever existed.
Where to watch: available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
Victor/Victoria, 1982
Julie Andrews in Victor/Victoria, where she plays a woman who pretends to be a man who pretends to be a woman - Alamy
In 1981, Edwards got his revenge for the executive interference he blamed for the failure of Darling Lili . He and Andrews released another farce, SOB , an angry, naked satire of Hollywood (Andrews plays the squeaky clean actress wife of a manic film producer).
As far back as 1971, chat show host Dick Cavett asked them both what they thought about the possibility of Andrews exposing her breasts on screen. It's odd that it should be considered normal to ask a woman if she would go topless just to disprove she was not a character audiences believed her to be from two decades before. Well, SOB is now mostly remembered for just this. Having been tranquilised before a musical performance, a groggy Andrews utters the immortal line: "I'm going to show my boobies." She then performs her song and rips off her scarlet top to give the world what it had – apparently – been waiting for all these years.
The infamous scene from SOB in 1981 - Alamy
Her next film, Victor/Victoria , is set in Paris in 1934, with Andrews playing a destitute woman who is persuaded to be a female impersonator: a woman who pretends to be a man who pretends to be a woman.
"The role stood me on my ear," she said. "It was crazy, like patting your head and rubbing your stomach."
For some of her films with Edwards, you get the feeling all this straining to test the boundaries is a little self-defeating, but at least Victor/Victoria has the sweetness and warmth to keep an audience suspending their disbelief, starting with Victoria's killer line "I'll sleep with you for a meatball". It also showcases deeper, more resonant tones in her voice, which were never to be heard again after botched surgery in 1997 wrecked her vocal cords .
An interview at the time with journalist and film critic Bobbie Wygant opens with the statement, "After watching Victor/Victoria , if this doesn't break the Mary Poppins image then you'd better just open a pizza stand someplace." You can see a little piece of Andrews die inside, though she is as polite as ever.
That's the trouble when you play a character who is practically perfect in every way. Everyone believes it's true.
Where to watch: available to rent or buy on Prime Video, Sky Store and Apple TV
