Julie Andrews: A life on stage and screen, Dec 29, 1997

Julie Andrews: A life on stage and screen, by Robert Windeler

Published by Aurum London 1997.

Book reviewed by Kate Herbert around Dec 29, 1997

Julie Andrews was dubbed "Miss P and P" - Miss Prim and Proper - by the venomous New York gossip columnist, Joyce Haber. Her shattering of the public perception of her as a singing nanny-nun was to be the cause of her losing her glittering public profile according to biographer, Robert Windeler.

Windeler is not a colourful or poetic writer but he is certainly informative. We follow Julie's dislocated and unnervingly show-businessy childhood, her chequered marriage history and adoption of two Vietnamese orphans. Julie's fan club will be delighted with Windeler's sometimes annoying minutiae of Andrews' life. He even describes how she brewed her tea.

 Julie was born on October 1 1935, If you're interested in astrology, she was a classic Libran: needed to be liked, hated conflict, cultivated ambivalence, resisted anger, cracked jokes, whistled and sang on set. Is it any wonder she was seen as a cross between Mary Poppins and pixie-boots Maria Von Trapp?

 Her piano-playing mother left her stable, woodworking father for a brassy tenor she met on a concert tour. Julie toured England with the family act. By seventeen she had top billing. She supported the family playing in pantos until she landed the lead in 'The Boyfriend' in London then on Broadway two years later. She leapt to fame on stage as Eliza Doolittle opposite Rex Harrison in My Fair Lady.

Eventually, through sheer ease and proximity, she married Tony Walton her loyal, old English boyfriend who had come to the US as a designer. Julie remained Mrs. Prim - until Blake Edwards, director of the Pink Panther movies, stole her heart.

Julie went from strength to strength in musicals, although she lost the screen role of Eliza to Audrey Hepburn She was compensated by accolades for 'Camelot' and her huge hits,  'Mary Poppins' and 'The Sound of Music'. One fan of the latter was so obsessed that she saw it daily for a year. Julie was now a real Star.

It was the flop of "Star!" which marked her fall. Public and press hated it and she was now seen to be flagrantly flaunting her adultery by living with Edwards. Miss Squeaky Clean was now Miss Profligate.  After 'Darling Lili' flopped, Darling Julie became box office poison.

So she took to psychotherapy like a duck to water, attending five times a week from 1963-68. Her fraught childhood, recent marriage problems and guilt about fracturing her daughter's family life, provided plenty of material for analysis. One can speculate whether she addressed the whispers of homosexuality that, says Windeler, arose from a jokey kiss with her friend Carol Burnett years earlier.

During her early 70's lull in popularity Julie refused plenty of concert and TV offers. She wanted movies. She immersed herself in her children, her controlling husband and charities. The couple finally married and lived between two extravagant homes in Malibu and Switzerland with their five children.

Julie would now do only work which involved or was approved by Edwards. In '77 she returned to concerts. Edwards was on a roll with '10' and 'The Return of the Pink Panther'. In 1983 'Victor/Victoria', written by Edwards for his wife, won her a Golden Globe award.

It was thirty years since she had arrived for 'The Boyfriend'. Although she has never taken American citizenship, Julie was now less English. She used tea bags instead of a tea pot and was described variously as 'terribly nice but terribly nervous' (Christopher Plummer) or  'a nun with a switchblade'.

By the early 90's Julie's family was in tatters with the two adoptive daughters in drug rehab but her career was revitalised by concert tours, TV specials and two movies. She had a rose named after her, received the BAFTA lifetime award and was inducted into the US Theatre Hall of Fame .

This year, at 62 and after much illness during the struggling stage production of 'Victor/Victoria', she publicly refused a nomination for best actor because no other artists in the show were nominated. Julie Andrews is becoming assertive in her old age.

Has all that therapy finally worked?

KATE HERBERT