At the commercial height of her career in the '60s, actress/singer Julie Andrews could claim to be the primary performer associated with the longest-running musical in Broadway history, the highest-grossing Hollywood film ever made, and the biggest-selling album of all time. Each of those achievements was surpassed by others eventually, of course, but Andrews, while experiencing the ups and downs that are the lot of any popular entertainment figure, retained her status as a theater and film legend, and even enhanced her reputation as she became a senior citizen early in the 21st century. By then, her professional career stretched back more than 50 years and included stage work, recordings, radio, television, films, and children's literature. By 2005, she had added stage director to her list of accomplishments.
For most of her career, Andrews was blessed and burdened with an established persona. Her massive successes in the film musicals Mary Poppins (in which she played a magical nanny to two pre-World War I British children) and The Sound of Music (in which she played an aspiring nun-turned-governess to seven pre-World War II Austrian children) coalesced in the public mind into the character of a sweet-voiced, proper Englishwoman quickly ready to soothe childish traumas by crooning about "A Spoonful of Sugar" or "My Favorite Things." After those performances, she spent decades alternately conforming to and rebelling against the image they had given her. This struggle was played out against the background of the socially and politically tumultuous era of the late '60s and '70s, during which Andrews, who had conquered the entertainment world only a few years before, became virtually persona non grata, at least as far as the Hollywood film establishment was concerned. She persevered with the same determination that had brought her from a childhood in English vaudeville to Broadway stardom in only a few short years and that had sustained her. By the '80s, she was back to making films regularly; by the '90s she was back on Broadway; and by the 2000s her movie appearances were again coming in some of the highest-grossing pictures of the day. Throughout, she made regular, if infrequent recording sessions that eventually added up to a considerable body of audio work including both solo albums and soundtrack discs. Although her exquisite four-and-a-half-octave voice was injured in a 1997 throat operation, she eventually made at least a partial recovery to the point of singing professionally again by 2004.
Julie Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, on October 1, 1935. She was the daughter of Edward C. Wells, a teacher of woodworking and metal-crafting, and Barbara (Morris) Wells, a pianist and piano teacher. When she was four years old her parents divorced, and she went to live with her mother, who married Ted Andrews, a vaudeville entertainer. Her mother and stepfather performed together, and Andrews, who soon revealed an excellent singing voice, began participating in the family act, using the name Julie Andrews. She started taking singing lessons at the age of seven. She also studied acting and ballet at the Cone-Ripman School in London. In 1946, she made her radio debut with her mother and stepfather on the BBC program Monday Night at Eight, and on December 5 of that year the family appeared at a royal command performance at the Stage Door Canteen in London for Princess (later Queen) Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Andrews gradually became the star attraction in the act, and the following year was cast in her first legitimate stage show, singing the "Polonaise" aria ("Je Suis Titania") from Ambroise Thomas' 1866 opera +Mignon in the revue +Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome starting on October 23, 1947, shortly after her 12th birthday. She made her recording debut on the double-78 EP cast recording of the show, made for the English Columbia label. As the child labor law required, she appeared in the revue for only one year, then went back to touring the country with her parents. On November 1, 1948, she became the youngest performer ever chosen to appear in the Royal Command Variety Performance at the London Palladium. The same year, she released her first single under her own name when English Columbia issued the 78 "Je Veux Vivre"/"Come to the Fair," on which she sang with her stepfather to a piano accompaniment by her mother. During the Christmas season, she began a year-long run in the London Casino's pantomime show, +Humpty Dumpty. She made her television debut on the BBC program Radiolympia Showtime on October 8, 1949.
Andrews continued to take major roles in children's shows over the next several years: +Little Red Riding Hood (1950), +Aladdin (1951), +Jack and the Beanstalk (1952), and +Cinderella (1953). Meanwhile, she had a continuing role on the BBC radio series Educating Archie starting in 1950, and in 1952 hers was one of the dubbed-in English-language voices heard in a version of the 1949 animated Italian movie The Rose of Baghdad, her screen debut. In 1954, she appeared in a play, +Mountain Fire, her debut as a dramatic stage actress. That summer, she was cast in the leading role in a British musical, +The Boy Friend, for its Broadway production. She arrived in the U.S. for the first time in August 1954 and opened in the show on September 30, the day before her 19th birthday. Both the show's notices and hers were good, and +The Boy Friend ran for 483 performances. RCA Victor Records recorded the original Broadway cast album, marking her U.S. record debut.
After leaving +The Boy Friend, Andrews was cast opposite Bing Crosby in a musical adaptation of Maxwell Anderson's play +High Tor for television, with songs by Anderson and composer Arthur Schwartz. Sometimes referred to as the first made-for-TV movie, the production was shot in Hollywood in November 1955 and broadcast as an episode of Ford Star Jubilee on CBS on March 10, 1956, Andrews' American television debut. A soundtrack album was recorded and released by Decca Records. At the start of 1956, Andrews began rehearsals for +My Fair Lady, a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's play +Pygmalion, with songs by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, playing the title character, a London flower girl who is passed off as an upper-class woman by an elocutionist played by Rex Harrison. Andrews, then 20 years old, opened in the show on March 15, 1956, and it went on to become the longest-running Broadway musical up to its time, continuing for 2,717 performances. Andrews, who earned a Tony Award nomination for her performance, naturally appeared on the cast album recorded and released by the American Columbia Records label, which hit number one in the Billboard chart and in 1986 was certified for sales of three million copies in the U.S. (Worldwide sales by 1966 were estimated at six million copies.) Among the songs Andrews introduced were the standards "Wouldn't It Be Loverly" and "I Could Have Danced All Night."
While still appearing in +My Fair Lady, Andrews starred in a musical adaptation of +Cinderella for television with songs by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II that was broadcast live on CBS on March 31, 1957. She earned an Emmy Award nomination for her performance, and Columbia issued a cast album that reached the Top 20. Her increasing prominence led to other opportunities to record, and she paired with Martyn Green, a star of Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, for Tell It Again, a children's recording issued by Angel Records. She then signed with RCA Victor and cut her debut solo album, The Lass with the Delicate Air, a collection of British folk songs, released in January 1958, and followed it with an LP of standards, Julie Andrews Sings, and a studio-cast recording of the operetta +Rose-Marie with opera singer Giorgio Tozzi later that same year. Meanwhile, she, Harrison, and other members of the original Broadway cast of +My Fair Lady went to London and opened the West End production of the musical on April 30, 1958. It was nearly as successful in England as it had been in the U.S., running 2,281 performances. On February 1, 1959, Andrews and the cast re-recorded the score in stereo for the original London cast album, which Columbia released. Andrews married set designer Tony Walton on May 10, 1959. She gave her final performance of +My Fair Lady on August 8, 1959.
Freed from stage work for the first time in years, Andrews hosted four episodes of The Julie Andrews Show for BBC television in November 1959 and made appearances on American television in 1960 before going into rehearsals for another Lerner and Loewe musical, +Camelot, based on the Arthurian legend. The show opened on Broadway on December 3, 1960, and ran 873 performances. Columbia released the cast album, which topped the charts and went gold. Andrews, again nominated for a Tony Award, was contracted to stay with the show for a year and a half. During that time, she again found time for moonlighting activities. She signed a new recording contract with Columbia and in June 1961 cut her third solo album, Broadway's Fair Julie, an LP of show tunes released in December. On March 5, 1962, she and her friend, television star Carol Burnett, appeared together in concert for the Emmy Award-winning television special Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall, which was broadcast in June, with a charting LP version released simultaneously by Columbia. Andrews, by then pregnant, left +Camelot and restricted her activities for the rest of the year, though she did cut a fourth solo album, Don't Go in the Lion's Cage Tonight, containing some of her favorite British music hall songs. On November 27, 1962, she gave birth to Emma Kate Walton.
Warner Bros. Pictures had purchased the screen rights to +My Fair Lady, but the studio passed over Andrews, who had no movie experience, in favor of Audrey Hepburn, whose vocals were dubbed by veteran Hollywood ghost singer Marni Nixon. Instead, Walt Disney cast Andrews in the title role of his musical screen adaptation of the children's stories of P.L. Travers, Mary Poppins. She shot the film during 1963, and even before it was released was cast in two subsequent films, the non-musical The Americanization of Emily (October 1964), which she began working on immediately after completing Mary Poppins, and the screen version of the 1959 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical +The Sound of Music, which began shooting in the spring of 1964. Mary Poppins, Andrews' onscreen film debut, opened in September 1964 to general acclaim, immediately establishing her as a movie star. At $45 million, it became the highest-grossing movie released that year. Although only certified gold in the U.S., the soundtrack album, featuring such Andrews performances as "A Spoonful of Sugar" and the singles chart entry "Super-cali-fragil-istic-expi-ali-docious," hit number one and reportedly had sold over six million copies worldwide by 1968. (The LP also won the 1964 Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children.) Andrews won the Academy Award for best actress for the film.
The Sound of Music, which followed in March 1965, was even more successful. Grossing nearly $80 million domestically, it became the first film to beat 1939's Gone with the Wind as the biggest moneymaker in movie history, a ranking it held until the appearance of The Godfather in 1972. Again certified only as a gold record, the RCA Victor soundtrack album was estimated to have sold 15 million copies worldwide by 1976. (In 2000, RCA claimed U.S. sales of 11 million copies.) Andrews received a second Oscar nomination for the film. Naturally, she was much in demand for more film work, and she spent most of 1965 on location shooting the big-budget Hawaii, a straight movie in which she sang only one song. Toward the end of filming, she found time to appear on The Andy Williams Show on September 12, 1965, earning an Emmy Award nomination for her trouble. Soon after finishing Hawaii, she began work on director Alfred Hitchcock's thriller Torn Curtain, which actually opened prior to Hawaii, in July 1966. But she also managed to squeeze in her first television special, The Julie Andrews Show, broadcast November 28, 1965, on NBC. Hawaii, which finally appeared in October 1966, was the highest-grossing film released that year, although, because of its high production cost, it was not profitable. Nevertheless, 1966 marked the third year in a row that Andrews had been the star of the film that sold the most tickets at the box office. Not surprisingly, she was named the top female movie star of the year in the Quigley Poll, a ranking she would repeat in 1967 and 1968.
During 1966, Andrews shot her sixth movie, an original musical set in the '20s called Thoroughly Modern Millie. After completing it, she joined conductor Andr