Julie Andrews: MY BEST & WORST Hollywood Memories

THE BELOVED PERFORMER SHARES THE HIGHS AND LOWS OF HER AMAZING FILM CAREER

- LOUISE A. BARILE

The premiere of Mary Poppins should have been the best night of Julie Andrews’ life. Walt Disney had orchestrated a grand event at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood replete with searchlights in the sky, fairy-tale characters, and cheering fans and photographers lining a red carpet. Julie, looking gorgeous in a cream silk gown and rented mink stole, arrived on the arms of her husband and her proud father, who’d flown in from England.

Sadly, it all went downhill from there. “I was unprepared for the pressure and scrutiny, the feeling of being pulled, poked and shouted at,” Julie confesses. “I never sat down, and I don’t recall eating a morsel...I couldn’t wait to go home.”

A singer since her childhood in wartime Britain, Julie became the darling of Broadway in My Fair Lady, starred in two of Hollywood’s most beloved musicals, The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins, and over her six-decade career has amassed an Oscar, two Emmys, three Grammys and more. At 87, the twice-married mother of three can look back on her Hollywood triumphs and the ordeals she overcame with a sense of pride and accomplishment. “Who could have imagined that life would have taken such marvelous twists and turns?” she asks.