Julie Andrews: A Life on Stage and Screen
ISBN: , SKU: , AUTHOR: Windeler, Robert, PUBLISHER: Birch Lane Press, In she celebrated fifty years in show business, having made her professional singing debut at the London Hippodrome in -- at age twelve. In the half century since those last days of British vaudeville through her smash Broadway comeback in Victor/Victoria, Julie Andrews has triumphed as an entertainer. At thirteen Andrews performed for the Queen of England; at nineteen she was a Broadway star. At twenty-one, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, she became a theatrical legend. By thirty, she was the highest-paid and most beloved actress in the world, with an Academy Award for her first movie, Mary Poppins, and almost instant worldwide box-office championship with The Sound of Music. Her remarkable body of work had stamped her indelibly with an image she would come to hate; the quintessence of perky, wholesome innocence. After two flop musicals, Star and Darling Lili, the press and the public seemed to ignore her. She had turned into box-office poison in Hollywood. But even in semi-exile she worked in an Emmy-winning television variety series, wrote two successful children's books, and concentrated on her growing family. Julie Andrews had become a superstar before she became her own person, and now she made up for lost time. When she reemerged in movies in the s, it was in sensationally different roles, many of them created for her by her husband, Blake Edwards. After Duet for One, The Man Who Loved Women, and A Fine Romance there was no going back to Mary Poppins. In the s she returned to concert tours, musical recordings, and Broadway. She also returned to controversy, by refusing her nomination for an almost certain Tony Award to stand with the "egregiouslyoverlooked" -- the rest of the cast and crew, especially her writer-director husband. Here at last is the full life story of Julie Andrews -- her meteoric rise, her devastating fall, and her remarkable comeback; from the little English girl with the freaky four-octave, crystalline voice to the dynamic legend who has outlasted her critics. Robert Windeler's affectionate and insightful biography reveals the full-blooded woman behind the high and low notes.
