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WE HAVE grown accustomed to her face. Accustomed to the blossom in her cheeks, the bluish twinkle in her eyes.
But Dame Julie Andrews still has the sort of star power no amount of familiarity can erase.
Slipping into her seat at the opening of My Fair Lady in Brisbane, wearing dark glasses, the beloved stage and screen star was easily spotted. And, as the lights dimmed ahead of
the overture, ripples of applause swelled into a tsunami of affection.
A sustained roar that had the original Eliza Doolittle — not to mention Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp — standing briefly and waving back with embarrassed thanks.
“Goodness me, what an ovation,’’ the 81-year-old says the morning after.
But Andrews — directing an Australian revival of Lerner and Loewe’s classic Broadway musical — is quick to swivel the spotlight.
“This Australian company, they work so hard and give me everything I could possibly ask for,’’ she says. “I think of them almost as my second family.’’
Andrews — sauntering into a hotel anteroom in floral jacket, black slacks and suede shoes — seems especially taken with Anna O’Byrne, the Melbourne singer (Love Never Dies) cast as Eliza in her acclaimed 60th anniversary production.
“Anna is wonderful,’’ she says. “Her voice is gorgeous and she’s finding things in the role that I’m thrilled about, things I would never have thought of.’’
Andrews was only 20, with just one big show under her belt (The Boyfriend), when she landed the coveted role of Eliza opposite Rex Harrison’s Professor Henry Higgins. They were the toast of Broadway after My Fair Lady opened in New York on March 15, 1956. Audiences seeing the show on London’s West End were just as ecstatic.
“I did My Fair Lady for almost 3½ years, eight performances a week,’’ Andrews recalls. “It was a marathon.’’
No archival record remains of that astounding production. Eliza — the Covent Garden flower seller transformed from a “squashed cabbage leaf’’ into an English rose — was defined instead by Audrey Hepburn in the Oscar-winning 1964 Hollywood movie My Fair Lady.
“Audrey and I became good friends and one day she said to me, ‘Julie, you should have done the role (on screen) … but I didn’t have the guts to turn it down’,” Andrews says. “In fact, that’s not the reason I didn’t do it. Not because Audrey wanted it but because I wasn’t known
at that time. On Broadway I was known but they (Hollywood producers) wanted a huge box-office name.’’
Ironically, at the 1965 Academy Awards, it was Andrews — not Hepburn — who claimed the Best Actress Oscar: for Mary Poppins. Walt Disney had seen Andrews as Guinevere in Camelot — the fabled Lerner and Loewe musical that followed My Fair Lady — and decided she was “practically perfect’’ to play P.L. Travers’ magical nanny.
Mary Poppins opened the door to The Sound of Music, where Andrews’ do-re-mi charm
in the Bavarian Alps, and mastery of Rodgers and Hammerstein music, earned her another Oscar nomination.
“I was the lucky lady asked to do those roles,’’ she says airily.
But was this dream run just luck or good judgment?
“Young students ask me (that) all the time … where the good fortune comes in is, you never know when a great role is going to float past,” she says. “The thing is, do your homework.
Be ready when they do.’’
This is the sort of sensible advice Andrews dispenses on Julie’s Greenroom, a new Netflix show where she joins Jim Henson puppets (her “Greenies”) in teaching kids — and kids at heart — about the “beautiful world of the arts’’.
“I did a lot of touring in my youth,’’ she says, “and I learnt very quickly that giving is what
it’s all about. It’s about the gift of making an audience feel great and forget their cares, if only for a few hours.’’
But do actors ever really learn how to handle success? The Sound of Music, a megahit, made Andrews the America’s biggest film star in 1966.
“It certainly knocked me sideways for a while,’’ she says. “There’s a great wave of people coming at you and it does take a certain amount of discipline.
“You have to collect yourself, keep your head and realise this is not the way it’s always going to be. It’s a dream life for a little while.’’
Our relationship with music begins before almost everything else, an acoustic connection which is created even before a baby is born, Broadway legend Julie Andrews says.
“What is the first thing a mum does to a baby?” the 81-year-old star of The Sound of Music and Mary Poppins asks, in that tone which both gently challenges but also reassures that the answer is coming in a moment. “She sings to it.”
Andrews, in collaboration with her daughter Emma Walton-Hamilton, is turning that very gentle idea into a television series, Julie’s Greenroom, which steps into the early childhood education space using melody, poetry and puppetry.
The Netflix series, developed in collaboration with Judy Rothman Rofe, with whom Andrews and Walton-Hamilton have worked previously, seems to consciously step into the Sesame Street space, complete with puppets from the Henson Company.
Julie Andrews’ new Netflix show teaches kids how fun the performing arts can be. She and her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton talk about all the wonderful lessons children can learn from the stage. USA TODAY
Idina Menzel
The Frozen actress pops in for the first episode to introduce the Greenies to different types of plays and invite them on a field trip to Broadway’s Wicked, for which she won a best-actress Tony Award playing the Wicked Witch of the West, Elphaba. Menzel “is such an arts advocate herself,” Hamilton says. “She runs this wonderful outreach program for urban girls (A Broader Way), providing them with the means through the arts to find their voices, so that was just a natural fit.” Plus, “I do not know one kid that isn’t singing Frozen,” Andrews says.
Alec Baldwin
Saturday Night Live’s Donald Trump impersonator-in-chief sheds the blond comb-over to teach the Greenies about acting and share a song with Andrews. “He was very proud to be singing,” she says. “He had just finished a duet with Barbra Streisand (for her album, Encore: Movie Partners Sing Broadway), so I had heavy competition.” The original tune “is a tribute to what you do when you act, and we keep topping each other. It’s great fun. He’s brilliant in it, because he’s a wonderful impersonator anyway, so he’s suddenly doing one character and then another and another, and explaining how you can be anything when you act.”
