Julie Andrews

by Robert Windeler

Since her professional singing debut at the London Hippodrome in 1947 - at the age of twelve - Julie Andrews has been a star. In the half century since those last days of British vaudeville, up through her smash Broadway comeback in Victor/Victoria, she has triumphed on stage, in the movies, and on television. At thirteen, Julie gave a command performance for the Queen of England, at nineteen she became a Broadway star in The Boy Friend, and she became a theatrical legend before she was twenty-one, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. By the time she was thirty-one, Julie was the best-paid and most beloved actress in the world, with an Academy Award for her first movie, Mary Poppins, and an international box-office championship with her third movie, The Sound of Music. Her remarkable body of work up to this point stamp her with an indelible image she came to resent: wholesome, innocent, the nanny next door. Worse, at the peak of her enormous success, Andrews was unhappy enough to submit