The Princess’s Diary

Julie Andrews, immaculate and crisp, is walking through a dusty construction zone in Broadway’s New Amsterdam Theatre. At 72, she still looks wonderfully like, well, Julie Andrews.

It was here that the 20-year-old English ingenue with an astonishing vocal range realised she had no idea how to become Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. “I was inexperienced and painfully aware of it,” writes Andrews in her lovely new memoir Home.

Andrews has always loved the musty atmosphere of old theatres—“the smells,” she writes, “of paint and makeup, and grease and sweat, and most of all, of warm dust from the great drapes and the painted drops and the grubby, pockmarked stage.”

Her mother and stepfather toured Britain in the dying days of vaudeville, and not long after the freakishly gifted Julie began voice lessons at the age of 9, she joined her parents in their act. At 12, she sang in a glamorous London revue called Starlight Roof—and when she hit the F above the top C, she practically caused a riot.

“Once I’d made up my mind that my dad was my dad, it wasn’t so difficult,” she says now. You can see what inspired one director to say, “She has that terrible British strength that makes you wonder how they ever lost India.”

We are sitting in the midst of the vast empty main theatre of the New Amsterdam—“Isn’t it lovely here?” she says—talking about her book. “I’m surprised that reviewers are finding my childhood so appalling,” she says. “It was fairly modest, but it was what it was. I never felt sorry for myself. There is that show-business thing—get on with it and do it.”

Andrews ends Home on a happy note, as she’s winging first class to Hollywood to start filming Mary Poppins, with her husband, and their new baby, Emma. Andrews has no plans to write the rest of her story—“Everybody knows it,” she says. After Poppins came the even-bigger film of The Sound of Music, the end of her first marriage— and her now 38-year marriage to Blake Edwards.

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