ANDREWS, Julie

(b. 1 October 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England), singer and actress who, during the 1960s, became one of the biggest Broadway and Hollywood stars of all time but then suffered from upheavals in the film industry and changing public tastes.

Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells, the elder of two children of Edward Wells, a teacher, and Barbara Morris Wells, a pianist. She was called "Julie" from birth and acquired the last name "Andrews" after her mother divorced her father to marry a vaudeville singer named Ted Andrews, and the girl joined her mother and stepfather's act. Gifted from an early age with a striking soprano voice, Andrews attended a professional children's school, then took voice lessons and studied with a governess until she was fifteen.

As a teenager Andrews's talent eclipsed her mother and stepfather's. She made her solo debut in 1947 in London and toured in vaudeville and pantomime. At almost nineteen, she was chosen as the lead for the New York production of The Boy Friend (1954), a musical that originated in London. After a year in that role, she was selected to play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe's musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (1916). During her two years in this musical (1956–1958), Andrews proved herself as an actress, moving with seeming ease from a cockney flower girl to a grand lady.

After marrying her childhood sweetheart, the theatrical designer Tony Walton, on 10 May 1959, Andrews starred as Guinevere in Lerner and Loewe's next production, Camelot(1960–1962). Although this reworking of the Arthurian legend received slightly less glowing reviews than My Fair Lady, it brought success to its creators and stars, and Andrews was the darling of Broadway.

While appearing in stage productions, Andrews had ventured into television. She costarred with Bing Crosby in the television musical "High Tor" (1956), and she was picked by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II to star in their television version of "Cinderella" (1957). In 1962 Andrews teamed with her friend Carol Burnett for "Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall," an hour of comedy and music that highlighted the contrast between the informal American comedienne and her "refined" English chum. Despite these successes and her theatrical fame, Andrews was not thought of as a natural for motion pictures, and all three of her Broadway roles went to other actresses when the plays were adapted for the large screen. The animation kingpin Walt Disney was not concerned with using established film stars, however, and after seeing Camelot he asked Andrews to take the title role in his live action/animation amalgam Mary Poppins (1964). As an incentive, he asked Walton to serve as the film's production designer. The pair, who had just had a daughter in 1962, journeyed to California for the film, in which Andrews portrayed a stern yet fanciful English nanny who won the hearts of her charges (and the viewing public).

The role gained Andrews an Academy Award for best actress (rumored to have been accorded her partly in sympathy for the loss of the My Fair Lady movie lead to non-singer Audrey Hepburn) and the leads in two other films. In The Americanization of Emily (1964), she had her first nonsinging role as a young Englishwoman in World War II who dates a coward in order to avoid heartbreak. The film's antiwar message delighted some viewers and confused others.

Andrews's talent was more prominently displayed in a film that echoed Mary Poppins in its wholesomeness and musicality, but became even more popular. For The Sound of Music (1965), director Robert Wise reworked Rodgers and Hammerstein's romantic musical play about nuns and Nazis in the Austrian Alps with scenic locations and added Andrews's forceful presence. The film made Andrews an eternal star—and typecast her as an optimistic virgin. The Sound of Music was the largest grossing film of all time for ten years, and proved one of Hollywood's most enduring musicals. It also proved one of the last.

Andrews's next films, although successful, were less well made and less popular. Torn Curtain and Hawaii (both 1966), drew on her dramatic abilities, but neither gave her a showy role. Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), directed by George Roy Hill, returned Andrews to her musical-comedy roots as a Midwestern lass turned flapper in the 1920s; it also gave her a chance to perform with theatrical legends Beatrice Lillie and Carol Channing. Nevertheless, it revealed fissures in the film community. According to Andrews's biographer Robert Windeler, Hill wanted to make the film short and light, but was induced by his studio to inflate it into a "prestige" road show production.

Andrews's next two films also followed the prestige route—straight into bankruptcy. In the 1960s major studios began to embrace the blockbuster mentality, hoping to recuperate losses with big films that would, like The Sound of Music, make enough money to save whole corporations. To do the executives justice, it is hard to see how anyone could have predicted that public taste would turn away from big-budget musicals—and from Andrews. Nevertheless, the costly Star! (1968), in which Andrews played the writer Gertrude Lawrence, and Darling Lili (1970), in which she portrayed a fictitious singing spy in World War I, lost money.

Biographers are torn in accounting for this change in the public's affections. Some accounts suggest that viewers did not want to see the "pure" star of The Sound of Music play a real woman with feet of clay or a spy. Others argue that as moviegoers became more cynical, they turned against the wholesomeness Andrews and musicals seemed to represent. In any case, her association with the decade's most popular film harmed her future acting prospects, and Andrews retired temporarily from moviemaking.

She returned to film from time to time—mainly with the writer-director of Darling Lili, Blake Edwards, whom she had married on 12 November 1969, after divorcing Walton in 1968. The couple adopted two children, and Andrews became a stepmother to Edwards's two children from a previous marriage. Edwards tried to expand Andrews's persona by making films in which she appeared sexy and even bawdy. The most successful of these, Victor/Victoria (1982), was transformed into a stage play, and Andrews found herself back on Broadway in 1995. Despite the loss of much of her singing voice after a throat operation in 1997, she continued to perform in occasional nonsinging roles in film and television.

Andrews never quite managed to move beyond her image of the 1960s, however. For good or ill, she would always be associated in the public mind with Mary Poppins's "Spoonful of Sugar" and The Sound of Music's "Favorite Things," with a perky sweetness that peaked and then quickly entered the realm of nostalgia during that decade of change.

Andrews has received surprisingly little serious coverage from biographers. Robert Windeler, Julie Andrews: A Life on Stage and Screen (1997), is the most comprehensive work, followed by Les Spindle, Julie Andrews: A Bio-Bibliography (1989). James Arntz and Thomas S. Wilson, Julie Andrews (1995), is mainly a picture book with extended captions. An example of the adoring press coverage of Andrews during her heyday in the 1960s is "The Now and Future Queen," Time (23 Dec. 1966). Also helpful is the Public Broadcasting Service Great Performances presentation "Julie Andrews: Back on Broadway" (1995).

Tinky "Dakota" Weisblat