Profile: Julie Andrews

Published on Saturday 28 November 2009 19:12

THE impending festive season means three films on our TV screens: The Great Escape, Mary Poppins and, of course, The Sound of Music. As the lead character in two of the nation's Christmas favourites, Julie Andrews' unmistakable voice is seared into our consciousness from the age that we are able to operate the remote control.

Many thought, however, that the chances of ever again hearing that voice live were gone, thanks to a botched operation that robbed the 74-year-old Dame of the British Empire of her greatest gift. In 1997, after a run of 772 performances, she underwent surgery to remove non-malign nodules from her throat and lost her soprano voice, the very thing that defined her.

Even experimental treatment by a world-leading scientist who developed a rubbery gel to replace scarred vocal chords didn't help, yet through sheer force of character and a determination to perform, Andrews has announced she will appear on a London stage for the first time in 30 years, in a one-off event at London's O2 Arena next May.

The fear is that her voice may be a shadow of what it once was, more Axl Rose than Maria von Trapp, but she will be there singing four or five solo numbers. "I got through the Blitz and if I can do that I can get my voice back," she says.

Andrews says losing her voice has been the worst thing that has ever happened to her – which is saying something because while she radiates a squeaky-clean image, there is a darker side to the English rose. She had a profoundly dysfunctional early life, one which imbued her with a steeliness to match her precocious talent.

Andrews herself detailed her difficult family circumstances in her autobiography Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, which was such a compelling read that it topped the New York Times non-fiction bestseller list after its publication in April 2008. Her decision to pen an uncompromising account of her life seemed to many people a strange one, but there had already been signs that she had tired of the saccharine image which had become her straitjacket, not least in her decision to appear topless in second husband Blake Edwards' 1981 film S.O.B.

Since a distraught Andrews lost her voice at Mount Sinai Hospital in 1997, writing has become increasingly important to the workaholic. Using the name Julie Edwards, she co-wrote 16 hugely successful children's books with her daughter Emma, and then turned her attentions to her cathartic autobiography. It was, she said, like discovering a second voice. "I have found another way of using my voice," she said. "Not a better way, but another way."

What she chose to say with that voice in Home came as something of a shock, however. There were reminiscences about growing up as a very poor child in wartime Britain, dodging the doodlebugs and playing on air raid sites, but it was the intimate familial revelations which caught the headline writers' imagination.

Her story may start with a maternal grandfather who was a coalminer who died aged 43 of syphilis after infecting her grandmother, but it was her vaudeville mother Barbara and her Canadian-born performer stepfather Ted Andrews who emerged as the villains of the piece.

When Andrews was born, it was to Barbara and her first husband Ted Wells, a schoolmaster who taught woodwork, but who was not Julie's father. She only found out at the age of 14 that the man who was "my rock, my inspiration" was not her father, and that she'd been conceived in a tryst with a family friend in a suburban London park. That knowledge, she later confessed, "rocked my world".

Not that she should have been surprised. By the time war broke out, her beloved mother had left her father for stepfather Ted, only for the two to descend into bickering alcoholism, and it was a struggle to put food on the table. It was, said Andrews "a very dark period in my life", one in which the family lived in a London slum, in which her stepfather physically abused her brother John and made so many passes at her that she avoided being alone with him and put a bolt on her bedroom door.

Yet Andrews' difficult early years also contained the springboard to greatness. She was a musical prodigy, a child with a "freakish" four-octave range, and it was her parents and stepfather who nurtured that talent. Her father paid for her to attend an independent arts school in London and to have lessons with famous concert soprano and voice instructor Lillian Stiles-Allen, who became "my third mother" after Barbara and Andrews' main childhood confidant, her aunt Joan.

Andrews was catapulted to fame by joining her mother and stepfather's cabaret act, aged just ten. Ted would sing everything from grand opera to Elvis ballads, while Barbara accompanied him on the piano and ten-year-old Julie stood on a beer-crate singing Come To The Fair.

By the age of 12 the little girl dubbed "the prodigy with the pigtails" by enchanted reviewers had her own show at the Hippodrome, and shortly after her 13th birthday she became the youngest solo performer in a Royal Command Variety Performance at the London Palladium. By 14, when she made her television debut, she was already tipped to be a star, and a two-year run in the BBC radio comedy Educating Archie, plus West End runs in Aladdin, Humpty Dumpty, Little Red Riding Hood and Cinderella merely cemented that status.

Her early years forged a teak-tough performer who could withstand whatever a Hollywood might throw at her. As director Moss Hart said of her: "She had that terrible British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India."

Whether it was her grounding in the dying days of Vaudeville or the tough apprenticeship as part of her mother and stepfather's cabaret act, she appeared to be iron-clad. After making her name in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady almost every night for two years, she even managed to shrug off the intense disappointment of losing out to Audrey Hepburn when the film was cast. Instead, at 28 she made her name and her film debut in Mary Poppins, for which she won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1964. Hepburn wasn't even nominated.

Within a year she had made The Sound of Music and forever etched herself into the national consciousness. She always regarded herself as a singer who could act rather than an actor who could sing, yet she has proved interchangeable. Since her seminal role as Maria von Trapp, she has appeared in everything from The Muppet Show and the Grammy-winning Victor/Victoria to The Princess Diaries and the voice of Queen Lillian in Shrek 2.

More even than a singer or an actor, she is a survivor.