During the height of her commercial success throughout the 1960s, the actress and vocalist Julie Andrews stood out as the central figure tied to Broadway’s longest-running musical production ever, the top-earning Hollywood motion picture released up to that time, and the album with the highest sales figures on record. Although later artists would overtake each of those benchmarks, Andrews weathered the typical career peaks and valleys that confront any widely recognized entertainer, all while preserving her standing as a revered figure in both theater and film; her reputation actually grew once she reached her senior years at the start of the twenty-first century. By that period more than fifty years had passed since her professional debut, a span that encompassed stage performances, audio recordings, radio work, television appearances, motion pictures, and books written for children. She expanded her credits still further by directing a stage production by 2005.
For much of her working life Andrews carried both the advantages and constraints of a firmly established public image. Her leading roles in the screen musicals Mary Poppins, where she portrayed a magical caregiver to two British children before World War I, and The Sound of Music, where she portrayed an aspiring nun who becomes governess to seven Austrian children before World War II, merged in audience perception into the archetype of a sweetly voiced, decorous Englishwoman who readily comforts young characters by singing “A Spoonful of Sugar” or “My Favorite Things.” In the decades that followed she alternately embraced and resisted the impression those portrayals created, doing so against the backdrop of the socially and politically turbulent late 1960s and 1970s, when the same performer who had recently dominated the entertainment industry found herself largely unwelcome within the Hollywood studio system. She persisted with the resolve that had propelled her from childhood appearances in English variety shows to Broadway stardom within a few short years and that continued to sustain her afterward. By the 1980s she resumed making films on a regular basis; by the 1990s she returned to Broadway; and by the 2000s she again appeared in several of the year’s highest-grossing pictures. Throughout these periods she continued to schedule occasional recording sessions that gradually produced an extensive catalog of solo albums and soundtrack releases. Although a 1997 throat operation impaired her distinctive four-and-a-half-octave voice, she achieved at least a partial recovery sufficient to resume professional singing by 2004.
Julie Andrews entered the world as Julia Elizabeth Wells on October 1, 1935, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England. Her father, Edward C. Wells, taught woodworking and metal-crafting, while her mother, Barbara (Morris) Wells, worked as a pianist and piano instructor. After her parents divorced when she was four, she moved in with her mother, who later married the vaudeville performer Ted Andrews. Her mother and stepfather performed as a duo, and Andrews, who soon displayed a strong singing voice, joined the family act under the name Julie Andrews. She began formal vocal training at age seven and also studied acting and ballet at London’s Cone-Ripman School. In 1946 she made her radio debut alongside her mother and stepfather on the BBC program Monday Night at Eight; on December 5 of that year the family performed at a royal command variety show at the Stage Door Canteen in London before Princess Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth II) and Princess Margaret. Andrews quickly became the featured attraction in the act, and the following year she received her first legitimate stage role, performing the “Polonaise” aria (“Je Suis Titania”) from Ambroise Thomas’s 1866 opera Mignon in the revue Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome beginning October 23, 1947, shortly after her twelfth birthday. She appeared on the double-78 EP cast recording of the show issued by the English Columbia label. Child-labor regulations limited her stage appearances to one year, after which she resumed touring with her parents. On November 1, 1948, she became the youngest artist selected for the Royal Command Variety Performance at the London Palladium. That same year English Columbia released her first single under her own name, the 78 “Je Veux Vivre”/“Come to the Fair,” on which she sang with her stepfather to her mother’s piano accompaniment. During the Christmas season she began a year-long engagement in the London Casino pantomime Humpty Dumpty. She made her television debut on the BBC program Radiolympia Showtime on October 8, 1949.
Over the next several years Andrews continued to take principal parts in children’s stage productions, including Little Red Riding Hood (1950), Aladdin (1951), Jack and the Beanstalk (1952), and Cinderella (1953). She maintained a recurring role on the BBC radio series Educating Archie beginning in 1950, and in 1952 she supplied one of the English-dubbed voices in a version of the 1949 Italian animated film The Rose of Baghdad, marking her screen debut. In 1954 she appeared in the play Mountain Fire, her first dramatic stage role. That summer she was cast in the lead of the British musical The Boy Friend for its Broadway transfer. She arrived in the United States for the first time in August 1954 and opened in the production on September 30, the day before her nineteenth birthday. Both the show and her performance received favorable notices, and The Boy Friend completed 483 performances. RCA Victor recorded the original Broadway cast album, which served as her United States recording debut.
After departing The Boy Friend, Andrews was cast opposite Bing Crosby in a television musical adaptation of Maxwell Anderson’s play High Tor, with songs by Anderson and composer Arthur Schwartz. Sometimes described as the first made-for-television movie, the production was filmed in Hollywood in November 1955 and aired as an episode of Ford Star Jubilee on CBS on March 10, 1956, constituting Andrews’s American television debut. A soundtrack album appeared on Decca Records. At the beginning of 1956 she began rehearsals for My Fair Lady, the Lerner and Loewe musical drawn from George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, in which she portrayed the flower girl Eliza Doolittle who is transformed into a refined lady by the elocutionist Henry Higgins, played by Rex Harrison. Then twenty years old, Andrews opened in the show on March 15, 1956; it became the longest-running Broadway musical to that date, logging 2,717 performances. She earned a Tony Award nomination and appeared on the original Broadway cast album recorded by Columbia Records, which reached number one on the Billboard chart and received triple-platinum certification for three million copies sold in the United States by 1986 (with worldwide sales estimated at six million by 1966). Among the standards she introduced were “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly” and “I Could Have Danced All Night.”
While still performing in My Fair Lady, Andrews starred in a live television musical adaptation of Cinderella with songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, broadcast on CBS on March 31, 1957. She received an Emmy Award nomination, and Columbia released a cast album that reached the Top 20. Her growing visibility led to further recording opportunities; she collaborated with Gilbert & Sullivan veteran Martyn Green on the children’s album Tell It Again for Angel Records. She then signed with RCA Victor and recorded her first solo album, The Lass with the Delicate Air, a collection of British folk songs issued in January 1958, followed later that year by the standards album Julie Andrews Sings and a studio-cast recording of the operetta Rose-Marie with opera singer Giorgio Tozzi. Meanwhile she, Harrison, and other original Broadway cast members transferred My Fair Lady to London’s West End, where it opened on April 30, 1958, and ran 2,281 performances. On February 1, 1959, the cast re-recorded the score in stereo for the original London cast album released by Columbia. Andrews married set designer Tony Walton on May 10, 1959, and gave her final performance in My Fair Lady on August 8, 1959.
Free of stage commitments for the first time in years, Andrews hosted four episodes of The Julie Andrews Show for BBC television in November 1959 and made additional American television appearances in 1960 before beginning rehearsals for another Lerner and Loewe musical, Camelot, based on Arthurian legend. The production opened on Broadway on December 3, 1960, and completed 873 performances. Columbia issued the cast album, which topped the charts and earned gold certification. Although again nominated for a Tony Award, Andrews remained with the show for a year and a half. During that period she recorded her third solo album, Broadway’s Fair Julie, a collection of show tunes released by Columbia in December 1961. On March 5, 1962, she joined television star Carol Burnett for the Emmy-winning special Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, broadcast in June with a simultaneously released charting Columbia album. While pregnant she left Camelot and limited her schedule for the remainder of the year, though she recorded a fourth solo album, Don’t Go in the Lion’s Cage Tonight, featuring British music-hall songs. On November 27, 1962, she gave birth to Emma Kate Walton.
Warner Bros. acquired the film rights to My Fair Lady but selected Audrey Hepburn, whose vocals were dubbed by Marni Nixon, over Andrews, who lacked prior screen experience. Walt Disney instead cast her as the title character in his musical adaptation of P.L. Travers’s stories, Mary Poppins. She filmed the picture during 1963 and, even before its release, was cast in two additional projects: the non-musical The Americanization of Emily (October 1964), which she began immediately after completing Mary Poppins, and the screen version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1959 musical The Sound of Music, which began shooting in spring 1964. Mary Poppins, Andrews’s cinematic debut, opened in September 1964 to widespread praise and established her as a motion-picture star. Grossing $45 million, it became the year’s highest-earning release. Although certified only gold in the United States, the soundtrack album, which featured her performances of “A Spoonful of Sugar” and the charting single “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious,” reached number one and reportedly sold more than six million copies worldwide by 1968; it also received the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children. Andrews won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
The Sound of Music, released in March 1965, proved even more successful. Earning nearly $80 million domestically, it surpassed 1939’s Gone with the Wind as the highest-grossing film in history, a record it held until The Godfather in 1972. Although certified only gold, the RCA Victor soundtrack album was estimated to have sold fifteen million copies worldwide by 1976 (RCA later cited eleven million U.S. copies by 2000). Andrews earned a second Oscar nomination. She remained in high demand and spent most of 1965 filming the lavish production Hawaii, a non-musical role in which she sang only once. Near the end of that shoot she appeared on The Andy Williams Show on September 12, 1965, receiving another Emmy nomination. Shortly afterward she began work on Alfred Hitchcock’s Torn Curtain, which opened in July 1966 ahead of Hawaii. She also found time for her first television special, The Julie Andrews Show, broadcast on NBC on November 28, 1965. Hawaii, finally released in October 1966, ranked as that year’s top-grossing picture, though its high production cost prevented profitability. Thus 1966 marked the third consecutive year in which Andrews starred in the year’s highest-earning film. She was named the top female movie star in the Quigley Poll for 1966, 1967, and 1968.
During 1966 Andrews filmed her sixth picture, the original 1920s musical Thoroughly Modern Millie. Afterward she joined conductor André Previn and members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic to record a Christmas album initially distributed as a Firestone Tire Company promotion and later issued commercially by RCA Victor in 1967 under the title A Christmas Treasure. Thoroughly Modern Millie opened in March 1967 to solid box-office returns, though not on the scale of her earlier successes; the Decca soundtrack album reached the Top 20 and earned gold certification. She next devoted most of 1967 to the big-budget biographical musical Star!, portraying British stage actress-singer Gertrude Lawrence. The film, accompanied by a Top 100 soundtrack album on 20th Century-Fox Records, opened in July 1968 and proved a costly failure. While filming another expensive musical, Darling Lili, written, directed, and produced by Blake Edwards, whom she married on November 12, 1969 (after divorcing Tony Walton on May 7, 1968), she starred in her second television special, An Evening with Julie Andrews and Harry Belafonte, on NBC three days before the wedding. Darling Lili reached theaters in summer 1970 along with a charting RCA Victor soundtrack album. It became her second consecutive major commercial disappointment, leading to the cancellation of her next two screen projects and leaving her without film offers five years after headlining the biggest box-office hit of its era.
Andrews turned to other media and worked less frequently during the 1970s. On July 1, 1971, she and Carol Burnett taped their second joint special, Julie and Carol at Lincoln Center, for CBS broadcast on December 7, accompanied by a Columbia album. Also in 1971 she published her first children’s book, Mandy, under the name Julie Edwards; it was followed by The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles in 1974. She signed with ABC for the musical-variety series The Julie Andrews Hour, which premiered September 13, 1972. Although canceled after one season, the program won seven Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Musical Series. Following the series she and her family relocated to Gstaad, Switzerland, yet she continued to appear in frequent television specials, among them Julie on Sesame Street (November 1973), Julie’s Christmas Special (December 1973), Julie and Dick in Covent Garden with Dick Van Dyke (April 1974), Julie and Jackie: “How Sweet It Is” with Jackie Gleason (May 1974), and Julie: “My Favorite Things” (April 1975). She also increased her charitable work, notably with the Committee of Responsibility, an organization aiding Vietnamese children, which prompted her to adopt two infant girls, Amy Leigh and Joanna Lynn Edwards.
After four years away from the screen Andrews returned in The Tamarind Seed, a spy drama written and directed by her husband, released in July 1974, though the film failed to revive her cinematic career. In 1975 she recorded her first solo album in nearly a decade, another holiday collection, The Secret of Christmas, issued in the United Kingdom on Embassy Records (Columbia released an expanded U.S. version titled Christmas with Julie Andrews in 1982). In 1976 she resumed concert singing with engagements at the London Palladium from June 9–19 and at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas; she also used the alias “Ainsley Jarvis” to perform “Until You Love Me” on the soundtrack of Blake Edwards’s The Pink Panther Strikes Again. A 1977 concert tour of the United States and Japan produced the live album An Evening with Julie Andrews, released only in Japan by RCA Victor. Additional television work followed in late 1977 and 1978, including the CBS special Julie Andrews: One Step into Spring (March 1978). She returned to singing onscreen in a featured role in Edwards’s 1979 comedy 10 and appeared on its Warner Bros. soundtrack album.
Andrews increased her film activity in the 1980s, beginning the decade with a remake of Little Miss Marker, her first picture not directed by her husband since Star! in 1968. After another television special, Julie Andrews’ Invitation to the Dance (November 1980), she co-starred in Edwards’s black comedy S.O.B. (July 1981), which reflected on the couple’s earlier experience with Darling Lili; in it she portrayed a wholesome star who adds a nude scene to rescue a failing film directed by her husband. Greater success came with Edwards’s Victor/Victoria (March 1982), in which Andrews starred in her first movie musical in twelve years, playing a penniless woman who poses as a female impersonator during the Depression. The Henry Mancini–Leslie Bricusse score yielded a soundtrack album on MGM/Polydor, and Andrews received her third Oscar nomination; plans were soon underway to adapt the film for the stage. Bainbridge Records released the country album Love Me Tender, which charted in Britain in July 1983. That December she portrayed a psychiatrist in Edwards’s The Man Who Loved Women. After several years largely out of the spotlight she appeared in two films within months: Edwards’s midlife comedy-drama That’s Life! (September 1986), partially shot at the couple’s Malibu home and featuring her daughter Emma Walton among other family members and friends, and the drama Duet for One (December 1986), in which she played a violinist diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. In 1987 she released a surprise album of love songs privately recorded as a birthday gift for her husband on his sixty-fifth birthday, July 26, 1987; at his encouragement the collection appeared commercially on the USA Music Group label as Love, Julie. Subsequent licensing produced multiple reissues under alternate titles, including Nobody Sings It Better (K-Tel, 1996), Tea for Two (Hallmark, 1999), The Essential Julie Andrews (Red X, 2000), Collection (MRA, 2002), So in Love (Mastersong, 2002), and Come Rain or Shine (Going for a Song). In December 1987 she starred in the ABC special Julie Andrews…The Sound of Christmas, which won five Emmy Awards. She had already launched her first concert tour in a decade, performing across the United States from late October 1987 into early 1988. In April 1989 she recorded her third holiday album, The Sounds of Christmas — From Around the World, available exclusively to Hallmark customers during the 1990 season. On June 9 and 10, 1989, she and Carol Burnett taped their third joint special, Julie and Carol: Together Again, at Hollywood’s Pantages Theater for broadcast on December 13. Following the taping she embarked on another concert tour that extended into the fall; an August 1989 performance was filmed for a PBS Great Performances special aired in March 1990.
At the start of the 1990s Andrews resumed acting, shooting an Italian romantic comedy with Marcello Mastroianni based on the play Tchin-Tchin. Released under varying titles in different markets—Cin Cin in Europe (1991), A Touch of Adultery on British video, Afternoon Tea in Bed in Japan, and A Fine Romance for its limited U.S. theatrical run in September 1992—she next appeared in the made-for-television movie Our Sons on ABC in May 1991, co-starring with Ann-Margret as the mother of an AIDS patient. In spring 1992 she attempted situation comedy, taping six episodes of the series Julie, in which she portrayed a television star who relocates her show to Iowa to be with her new husband; the program was canceled after the fifth broadcast. She then participated in a studio-cast recording of The King and I for Philips Records that charted in Britain and received a Grammy nomination for Best Musical Show Album. After another concert tour she surprised audiences by returning to the stage for the first time
