Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography
<p>Julie Andrews is the last of the great Hollywood musical stars, unequaled by any in her time.<br /><br />In <i>My Fair Lady,</i> Julie Andrews had the biggest hit on Broadway. As the title character in <i>Mary Poppins,</i> she won an Academy Award. And, in 1965, <i>The Sound of Music</i> made her the most famous woman in the world and rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, the disastrous <i>Star!</i> almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen.<br /><br />Her film career seemed over.<br /><br />Yet Julie Andrews survived, with what Moss Hart, director of <i>My Fair Lady,</i> called "that terrible British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India." <i>Victor/Victoria,</i> directed by her second husband, Blake Edwards, reinvented her screen image---but its stage version in 1997 led to the devastating loss of her defining talent, her singing voice.<br /><br />Against all odds, she has fought back again, with leading roles in <i>The Princess Diaries</i> and <i>Shrek 2</i>. The <i>real</i> story of bandy-legged little Julia Wells from Walton-on-Thames is even more extraordinary; fresh details of her family background have only recently come to light.<br /><br />This is the first completely new biography of Julie Andrews as artist, wife, and mother in over thirty-five years---combining the author's interviews with the star and his wide-ranging and riveting research. It is a frank but affectionate portrait of an enduring icon of stage and screen, who was made a Dame in the Millenium Honours List. <br /><br />Once dubbed "the last of the really great broads" by Paul Newman, she was the only actress in the 2002 BBC poll The 100 Greatest Britons. But who <i>was</i> Dame Julie, and who is she now?<br /><br />This is her story.</p>