Dame Julie Andrews(1935–)

Julia Elizabeth Wells was born on 1 October 1935 at the Rodney House nursing home in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, daughter of Edward Charles Wells, a Walton-on-Thames woodwork and metalwork teacher at the Hinchley Wood Secondary School, and Barbara Ward Morris, a vaudeville pianist. The marriage broke up when she was four; her mother subsequently married the Canadian-born music-hall singer Edward Andrews (known professionally as Ted Andrews), and the Andrews household, with Barbara and Ted touring the British music-hall circuit through the war years, took the surname Andrews as her stepfather's professional name and the stage surname she carried for the rest of her life. She was given vocal training from seven by her stepfather Ted, was discovered to have an unusual four-octave coloratura-soprano range by the London vocal coach Madame Lillian Stiles-Allen in 1944, and at twelve made her West End stage debut at the London Hippodrome in Val Parnell's revue *Starlight Roof* on 22 October 1947 singing the *Polonaise* aria from Mignon.

She was, in the late 1940s, the phenomenon of London-music-hall child performance: she sang for the Royal Family at the Royal Command Performance at the London Palladium on 1 November 1948 at thirteen (singing the same Mignon Polonaise), made her radio debut on BBC Radio's *Educating Archie* in 1950, and went into the touring music-hall circuit through the 1949 to 1953 period alongside her mother and stepfather. The American Broadway producer Cy Feuer saw her at twenty in Sandy Wilson's *The Boy Friend* at the Wyndham's Theatre London in October 1954, signed her on a one-year Broadway contract to play the lead in the New York transfer of *The Boy Friend* opening at the Royale Theatre, New York on 30 September 1954 (she sailed for New York the same week), and effectively launched the rest of her career.

The two productions that made her the female-musical-theatre lead of her generation were *My Fair Lady* (1956-60) and *Camelot* (1960-62). Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe cast her as Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway production of *My Fair Lady* opposite Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins, which opened at the Mark Hellinger Theatre on 15 March 1956 and ran for 2,717 performances across the next six and a half years (the longest Broadway musical run of its century to that point). She played the role for the first two-year contract to 1958, took the London West End opening at Drury Lane in April 1958, and went back to Broadway for the closing eighteen months of the New York run. Lerner and Loewe then cast her as Guenevere in *Camelot* with Richard Burton's King Arthur, which opened at the Majestic Theatre Broadway on 3 December 1960. Despite this string of successes and her Tony-Award nomination for *My Fair Lady*, Jack Warner cast Audrey Hepburn rather than Andrews for the 1964 film adaptation of *My Fair Lady*, on the Hollywood-industry assumption that Andrews was not a film star of the right marquee value for the film.

Walt Disney signed her in 1963 to play the title role in the Disney live-action adaptation of P. L. Travers's *Mary Poppins*. The film, made at Walt Disney Studios at Burbank, California through the 1963 and 1964 production cycle and released on 27 August 1964, was the Disney Studios' senior commercial success of the post-war decade, took the Best Actress Academy Award at the April 1965 ceremony for her title-role performance (the public-vindication moment for the Warner-Brothers *My Fair Lady* casting decision was widely understood at the time), and was followed the next year by Robert Wise's adaptation of Rodgers and Hammerstein's *The Sound of Music* at Twentieth Century Fox, in which she played Maria von Trapp opposite Christopher Plummer's Captain von Trapp. *The Sound of Music* (1965) was the highest-grossing film in the history of cinema at its release and is, on inflation-adjusted box-office figures, the third-most-successful film in the history of the medium. She was twenty-nine at its release.

The two-decade post-*Sound-of-Music* period was the commercial difficulty of her career: a substantial number of subsequent films (*Star!* 1968, *Darling Lili* 1970, *The Tamarind Seed* 1974, *10* 1979) underperformed against the late-1960s and early-1970s film-musical market that had moved away from her register. Her second marriage to the director Blake Edwards in 1969 produced the creative partnership of the post-1970 period of her career; she worked with Edwards across the next four decades on small successful comic features (*Victor/Victoria* 1982, for which she received the third Best Actress nomination, *That's Life!* 1986). A small routine throat surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital, New York in June 1997 to remove a non-cancerous nodule from her vocal cords destroyed her singing voice permanently; she has not sung in public since 1997. She has continued her acting career through *The Princess Diaries* (2001) and *The Princess Diaries 2* (2004), and as the voice of the Whisp character in *Despicable Me 2* (2013) and the post-2018 *Bridgerton* television series. She was created DBE in the 2000 New Year Honours. The Andrews name in the English-side catalogue is the patronymic of Andrew (the apostle), the common Christian-baptismal patronymic of the late medieval English-and-Welsh parishes; she carried the Walton-on-Thames Wells-Andrews stage-family variant of it through the twentieth-century female-musical-theatre canon.