Julie Andrews has been a beloved star of the stage, screen, and television for over half a century.
Born Julia Elizabeth Well in October 1935, she started her career on stage at just 12 and made her Broadway debut at 19.
Her career actually started out in opera and she was once billed as ‘Britain’s Youngest Prima Donna’.
She was then contracted for one year in a revue show in London called Starlight Roof staged at the London Hippodrome before she hit 13.
Julie also performed in Cap and Belles and admitted it was during this tour she began to doubt her future.
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She said: “During the tour of Cap and Belles I began to have serious doubts about the future.
“I started to ask myself what I had to offer and what I had learned. I was 17 and still traveling endlessly and still singing the same songs night after night.
“My youthful ‘freak’ voice seemed to be changing and I worried what the appeal would be once I lost that ‘gimmick’.”
However, she was wrong and in 1954, aged 19, she won the lead role of Polly in Sandy Wilson’s The Boy Friend on Broadway and crossed the Atlantic alone to take it up.
The success led to further work in the US, and in 1956 hers was the first, defining incarnation of Eliza Doolittle in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady.
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Julie married her first husband in Weybridge, England, in 1959 but they divorced in 1967. She was then married to director Blake Edwards from 1969 until his death in 2010.
In 1964 Mary Poppins was released, with Andrews taking on the titular role.
The film won five Oscars, including best actress for Andrews, and the songs became classics.
She then won an Oscar nomination for her role as Maria in The Sound of Music in 1965.
Julie’s career continued to go from strength to strength, starring in a variety of Hollywood films.
Her career didn’t stop as she got older as she starred in 2001’s The Princess Diaries.
Julie is still in good health but tragically lost her singing voice in 1997.
She had to undergo throat surgery to remove a small cyst which had developed on her vocal cord.
The surgery was botched and left her with vocal cord damage, hoarseness, and other complications and she has never fully recovered.
Still, in spite of the devastating loss of her singing voice, Andrews is in otherwise good health and going strong for 88!
The actress now spends her time as an author and has written over 26 children’s books.
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