Julie Andrews

• 1. Introduction

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  Julie Andrews stood on a beer crate to reach the microphone. She was not yet ten years old, performing spontaneously in wartime variety shows alongside her mother and stepfather, singing solos or duets while her mother played piano. That image captures something essential about her: a child thrust into a professional world before she had any framework for what it meant, learning everything from instinct and necessity.

  She was born Julia Elizabeth Wells on the 1st of October 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey. By the age of 12 she was performing the difficult operatic aria "Je suis Titania" at the London Hippodrome. At 13 she became the youngest solo performer ever to appear in a Royal Variety Performance, singing before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at the London Palladium. A year into her Broadway debut she was cast as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. Before she was 30, she had won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

  How does a child shaped by wartime poverty and a difficult home life become one of the defining performers of the twentieth century? What drove her from a beer crate to the Oscars podium? And what happened when the instrument at the centre of it all was taken away? Those are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. War, Family, and a Voice

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  Barbara Ward Wells, Andrews's mother, married a teacher named Edward Charles Wells in 1932. Andrews was not his biological child. She was conceived from an affair her mother had with a family friend, a fact Andrews did not learn until she was around 15, and which was not publicly disclosed until her 2008 autobiography.

  World War II split the family. Her parents divorced, each remarried, and Andrews was sent to live with her mother and stepfather, Ted Andrews, in 1940. The family was, by her own account, "very poor" and "lived in a bad slum area of London". Her stepfather was violent and an alcoholic. He twice tried to get into bed with his stepdaughter while drunk, resulting in Andrews fitting a lock on her bedroom door.

  As the stage careers of her mother and stepfather improved, the family moved first to Beckenham and then to the Andrews family hometown of Hersham. Her stepfather began paying for lessons, first at the Cone-Ripman School (now Tring Park School for the Performing Arts) and then with concert soprano Lilian Stiles-Allen. Stiles-Allen recorded in her memoir that Andrews possessed a rare gift of absolute pitch and a voice whose "range, accuracy and tone" amazed her, though Andrews herself denies the absolute pitch claim in her 2008 autobiography. Andrews described her own voice at the time as "a very pure, white, thin voice, a four-octave range." Of Stiles-Allen, she said simply: "She had an enormous influence on me. She was my third mother."

  The war shaped her in a way that never left. Andrews later described it as "a very black period in my life." Fellow child entertainer Petula Clark, three years her senior, recalled travelling the UK by train to sing for troops alongside Andrews, the two of them sleeping in luggage racks.

• 3. Broadway and the Making of Eliza

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  On the 30th of September 1954, the eve of her 19th birthday, Andrews made her Broadway debut playing Polly Browne in the London musical The Boy Friend. Actress Hattie Jacques had recommended her for the part, a connection Andrews regards as a "catalyst" in her career. She was anxious about leaving for New York; at the time she was both breadwinner and caretaker for her family.

  Near the end of her one-year run, she was approached to audition for Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe for the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. She was offered the part during her third reading. Director Moss Hart spent forty-eight consecutive hours working solely with Andrews during rehearsals, going through each scene until, as Andrews described it, "the good man had stripped her feelings bare, moulded, kneaded, and helped her become the character of Eliza." She called it the best acting lesson she ever received.

  My Fair Lady opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on the 15th of March 1956 and was a major success with both audiences and critics. Andrews describes her time as Eliza as "the great learning period" of her life. Shortly after opening, she was asked to tone down her learned cockney accent so American audiences could understand her, a change she later reversed when the production transferred to the West End.

  Concurrent with her run in My Fair Lady, Richard Rodgers cast her in the Rodgers and Hammerstein television musical Cinderella, written especially for her. It was broadcast live on CBS on the 31st of March 1957 under the musical direction of Alfredo Antonini and drew an estimated 107 million viewers. She was nominated for an Emmy for the performance.

  When casting for the film version of My Fair Lady began in 1962, Alan Jay Lerner hoped Andrews would reprise the role. Warner Brothers studio head Jack Warner disagreed, choosing established film actress Audrey Hepburn on the grounds that Andrews lacked sufficient box-office recognition. Warner later recalled the decision was financial. Andrews reflected that her Broadway experience had been "within a very small pond" but wished she had been able to record her performance for posterity.

• 4. Mary Poppins and Revenge

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  Walt Disney saw Andrews perform in Camelot and offered her the title role in Mary Poppins. She initially declined because of pregnancy, returning to London to give birth. Disney's response, as Andrews recounted, was firm: "We'll wait for you."

  After giving birth to her daughter, Andrews received a call from P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, who told her: "Well, you're much too pretty of course. But you've got the nose for it." Disney rented a house in Toluca Lake, Los Angeles, for her family during production.

  Andrews relied largely on instinct for the role, giving the character a particular walk and a turned-out stance. She called the production "unrelenting" given its physical demands and technical complexity, and said she "could not have asked" for a better introduction to film.

  Mary Poppins became the biggest box-office draw in Disney history at the time. The film received thirteen Academy Award nominations and won five, including Best Actress for Andrews. My Fair Lady, the film that had passed her over, was her direct competition at the awards.

  At the Golden Globes, Andrews closed her acceptance speech with deliberate precision: "And, finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner." Songwriter Richard M. Sherman described it as "sweet revenge".

  The following year, Andrews starred in The Sound of Music (1965), which became the highest-grossing film of its year. She later admitted she had found the musical "rather saccharine" before being cast. Filming took place in Salzburg, Austria, in 1964, and bad weather made progress slow; the cast were "lucky," she said, if they got a single shot's worth of scenes in a day. The film received mixed critical reviews, but Andrews won her second Golden Globe for Best Actress and earned her second Academy Award nomination for Best Actress.

• 5. From Hitchcock to Blake Edwards

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  Alfred Hitchcock directed Andrews opposite Paul Newman in Torn Curtain (1966), shot at Universal Studios Hollywood. Hitchcock gave his two stars relative free rein in dialogue. Andrews credits him with teaching her extensively about lenses and camera work. During a press interview she "made the mistake" of expressing her unhappiness with her own performance and received what she described as a "terse" letter from Hitchcock in response, which she later called "an important lesson."

  The following year she played the lead in Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967), describing work on the film as a "pleasant distraction" partly because her stepfather died shortly before filming began. Critics called her "absolutely darling" and "deliciously spirited and dry." The film was a box office success and earned seven Academy Award nominations. At the time, Millie and Torn Curtain were the biggest and second-biggest hits in Universal Pictures history, respectively.

  Two consecutive expensive failures followed: Star! (1968), a biopic of Gertrude Lawrence, and Darling Lili (1970), directed by Blake Edwards, who would become her second husband. Andrews married Edwards in November 1969. In the 1970s, they adopted two Vietnamese daughters, Amy Leigh and Joanna Lynne. They were married for 41 years, until Edwards died on the 15th of December 2010, at the age of 88, at Saint John's Health Center in Santa Monica, from complications of pneumonia. Andrews was at his side.

  With Edwards, Andrews made several films that rehabilitated her critical standing. Victor/Victoria (1982) cast her in a dual role as Victoria Grant and Count Victor Grezhinski. Her performance earned her a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress and a third Academy Award nomination. The film reunited her with James Garner, her co-star from The Americanization of Emily (1964), which she later described as her favourite film.

• 6. A Voice Lost and Adapted

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  Andrews was forced to quit the Victor/Victoria stage production in 1997 when she developed hoarseness in her voice. Liza Minnelli replaced her. She underwent surgery at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital to address what she later described as "a certain kind of muscular striation that happens on the vocal cords" resulting from strain during the production. She was clear about what the surgery was not: "I didn't have cancer, I didn't have nodules, I didn't have anything."

  She emerged from the surgery with permanent damage that destroyed the purity of her singing and made her speaking voice raspy. The doctors had assured her that she would regain her voice within six weeks. By 1999, two years after the surgery, her stepdaughter Jennifer Edwards noted it still had not returned. Andrews filed a malpractice suit against the operating doctors, Scott Kessler and Jeffrey Libin. The lawsuit was settled in September 2000 for an undisclosed amount.

  After 2000, Steven M. Zeitels, director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Laryngeal Surgery and Voice Rehabilitation, operated on her four times. He improved her speaking voice but could not restore her singing.

  Andrews adapted. She performed voice work as Polynesia the parrot in a London stage production of Dr. Dolittle in 1998, recording some 700 sentences and sounds placed on a computer chip in the mechanical bird. She took on voice roles in the Shrek franchise beginning in 2004, playing Queen Lillian. When she sang on film for the first time since the surgery, in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004), the song "Your Crowning Glory" was arranged within a limited range of one octave to accommodate her recovering voice. Music supervisor Dawn Soler recalled that Andrews "nailed the song on the first take" and that crew members had tears in their eyes.

• 7. Laureate and Author

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  In the 2000 New Year Honours List, Queen Elizabeth II made Andrews a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the performing arts. She received the insignia from the Queen at Buckingham Palace.

  Andrews has co-authored numerous children's books with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton. Her 23rd book, The Very Fairy Princess, reached number 1 on the New York Times Best Seller List for Children's Books in June 2010. She has directed stage productions, including a revival of The Boy Friend at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2003, which was later remounted at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2005 and sent on a national tour in 2006. In 2015, she was announced to direct My Fair Lady for Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House in 2016.

  Her first memoir, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, published on the 1st of April 2008, chronicles her early life in Britain's music hall circuit and ends in 1962. Her second, Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years (2019), includes her account of being offered the role of Aunt Emma by Martin Scorsese for The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), a role she declined because she was not ready to return to work.

  In September 2025, Andrews won an Emmy for her voicework as Lady Whistledown, the narrator of the Netflix period drama series Bridgerton, which she had been voicing since December 2020. The Kennedy Center Honors came in 2001, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2007, and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2022, where she reflected on her career and received tributes from multiple artists. The Bay Street Theatre, where she has directed, was co-founded by her daughter Emma in Sag Harbor, New York, the town where Andrews now lives.