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| Birth Name(s) : Julia Elizabeth Wells |
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Partner:
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Full Julie Andrews Biography
Dame Julie Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (born Julia Elizabeth Wells on 1 October 1935) is an award-winning English actress, singer, author and cultural icon. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honors. Andrews rose to prominence after starring in Broadway musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, as well as musical films like Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965).
The Andrews family was "very poor and we lived in a bad slum area of London," Andrews said, adding, "That was a very black period in my life." But as the stage career of Ted and Barbara Andrews grew in popularity, 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 Andrewses took up residence at The Old Meuse, a house where Andrews' maternal grandmother happened to have served as a maid.
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."
In 1956, she appeared in the Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner musical My Fair Lady as Eliza Doolittle, opposite Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins. The show was a musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and became the smash hit of the decade. Andrews was a sensation.
Before My Fair Lady, Andrews had auditioned for but not received a part in the Richard Rodgers play Pipe Dream. Rodgers wanted her for "Pipe Dream" but advised her to take the part in "My Fair Lady" if she was offered it, rather than the part in "Pipe Dream". Rodgers was so impressed with Andrews' talent that, concurrent with her run in My Fair Lady, Andrews was featured in the Rodgers and Hammerstein television musical, Cinderella. Cinderella was broadcast live on CBS on March 31, 1957 and attracted an estimated 107 million viewers.
Andrews was nominated for the 1965 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music. The movie also starred actors Christopher Plummer and Charmian Carr. The role had some superficial similarities to that of Mary Poppins.
Andrews was forced to quit the show towards the end of the Broadway run, 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 Stuart Kessler, who had operated on her throat. Originally, the doctors claimed that she should regain her voice within six weeks, but Andrews' stepdaughter Jennifer Edwards has claimed that "it's been two years, and it still hasn't returned."
In a recent (2006) interview, she said: "To be honest with you, I've never been busier in my life," Andrews said. "I'm not quite sure what I was supposed to learn from all of that. It did bother me. I can't say that I wasn't devastated. Singing, with an orchestra, being able to sing, was what I'd known my entire life. Whatever happened, I think I found so much to keep me feeling that I'm contributing still."
In April 2008, Andrews will release "part one", of her autobiography, entitled Home: A Memoir, which will chronicle her early years in England's Music Hall circuit, up to her winning the role of Mary Poppins. The American Library Association has invited Andrews to serve as the 2008 Chair of National Library Week to promote the value of libraries and librarians. "Libraries have always been places of opportunity, places where everyone can come together, whether for research, entertainment, self help or to find that one special book," she said.
Perhaps more interesting is that there is notable investment in the very films that cemented her alleged "sugary sweet" image, as much as, if not more, than in Victor/Victoria. The Sound of Music has long been a gay favorite, and its recent Singalong incarnation was originally created for London's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Recent queer theorists 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.
Julie Andrews' Invitation to the Dance with Rudolph Nureyev (The CBS Festival of Lively Arts For Young People) |
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