Dame Julie Andrews, so crisply accented, sweetly tuneful and girlish in her most famous movie musicals, has always had a sense of humour about her angelic image. She won the 1965 Oscar for playing a “practically perfect” English nanny for Walt Disney, but that didn’t stop her from driving around Los Angeles with a “Mary Poppins Was a Junkie” bumper sticker on her car. Or telling journalists that “I hate the word wholesome”, and her Hollywood nickname was “the nun with the switchblade”. Andrews turns 90 today, one of the most beloved of Hollywood stars, with one of cinema’s most astonishing voices. She can look back on a fascinating film career that includes such sweet spoonfuls of sugar as Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965) to The Princess Diaries (2001), but just as many films that are explicit, dark, or just plain surprising.
Andrews grew up in the blitz. She was born in Surrey in 1935, but moved to London. As a little girl she warbled to her neighbours during air raids, but it was when her stepfather gave her singing lessons that the full extent of her talent was discovered. At the age of eight, Andrews had an adult larynx, and a clear soprano voice with a four-octave range. She later joked that “dogs would come from miles around”, but she was a phenomenon, with a voice of impeccable musicality and clarity. Andrews started out in music hall, and did the Royal Variety Performance when she was only 13, before getting regular work at the BBC. Broadway called while she was still a teenager, first in The Boy Friend, then she was the original Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Loewe’s musical take on Pygmalion, My Fair Lady. She was a showstopper, and an even bigger hit once she toned down the cockney for American ears. Andrews would always be known for her immaculate diction as much as her euphony, the kind of singer who enjoyed the lyrics as much as the melody – which showed in her delivery.
