Dame Julie Andrews(1935–)

Julia Elizabeth Wells was born at Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, on 1 October 1935, daughter of a woodwork teacher and a vaudeville pianist. After her mother's remarriage to the music-hall singer Ted Andrews the family toured the British music-hall circuit, and she took the stage surname Andrews. Trained from seven, she was found to have an unusual four-octave coloratura range, and at twelve made her West End debut at the London Hippodrome in 1947 singing the Polonaise from Mignon.

She was the phenomenon of late-1940s London music-hall: she sang for the Royal Family at the Royal Command Performance at the Palladium at thirteen, made her radio debut in 1950, and toured the music-hall circuit through to 1953. The American producer Cy Feuer saw her at twenty in Sandy Wilson's The Boy Friend in London and brought her to Broadway to play the lead in its New York transfer, opening in September 1954.

Two productions made her the female-musical-theatre lead of her generation. Lerner and Loewe cast her as Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway My Fair Lady opposite Rex Harrison, which opened in March 1956 and ran 2,717 performances, the longest Broadway musical run of its century to that point; she played the role on Broadway and in the West End, and earned a Tony nomination. They then cast her as Guenevere in Camelot opposite Richard Burton, opening in December 1960.

Walt Disney signed her in 1963 to play the title role in Mary Poppins. The film, released in 1964, was the Disney Studios' great commercial success of the post-war decade and won her the Best Actress Academy Award at the 1965 ceremony. Robert Wise's The Sound of Music followed in 1965, with Andrews as Maria von Trapp: the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema at its release and, on inflation-adjusted figures, the third-most-successful film ever made. She was twenty-nine.

Her second marriage, to the director Blake Edwards in 1969, became the creative partnership of the rest of her career, across Victor/Victoria (1982), for which she received a third Best Actress nomination, and That's Life! (1986). A throat operation in 1997 ended her singing voice, and she continued as an actor through The Princess Diaries (2001 and 2004), Despicable Me 2 (2013) and the Bridgerton series. She was created DBE in 2000. The Andrews name, the Christian patronymic of the apostle Andrew, she carried in its Walton-on-Thames stage-family variant through the twentieth-century female-musical-theatre canon.