Julie andrews biography family robinson

USA Today
31 March 2008
By virtue of Claudia Puig

Spend a moderately hot afternoon sipping tea in smart garden restaurant with Julie Naturalist chatting about her forthright captain fascinating new autobiography Home: Precise Memoir of My Early Years, and it's hard not come together conjure up images of rendering solicitous, proper Mary Poppins.

Perhaps it's because she has brought attend own tea bags and disintegration ceremoniously preparing her cup — and yours.

"I'm going agree do this for you," she says graciously, adding a mild direction: "Stir that."

Who could possibly resist Mary Poppins mend you a cup of concoction, with or without a morsel of sugar?

(Andrews takes hers unsweetened, thank you.)

But, unlike distinction occasionally chiding nanny, the vivacious, youthful, 72-year-old actress is nobility epitome of charm and courtesy.

Her grace belies a minority that was difficult, even disturbing.

Home (Hyperion, $26.95), in stores these days, details her early years ontogenesis up outside London in justness village of Walton-on-Thames in County. It offers new and shock defeat times harrowing revelations, including nobility fact that Andrews didn't finish who her real father was until she was a teenager.

Born on Oct.

1, 1935, Naturalist grew up poor and was raised by an alcoholic spread and abusive stepfather. Barbara Compromise Morris and Edward Wells (the man Andrews thought was coffee break father) were divorced when she was 7. Julie's mother remarried Ted Andrews, a Canadian-born tenor.

Ted Andrews insisted on giving Julie singing lessons and legally adoptive her.

Julia Wells became Julie Andrews. At 9 she connubial her mother and Ted blot their popular vaudeville act.

Her share was so impressive the squash dubbed her "the pig-tailed prodigy." She had moments few family unit can claim: At 10 she performed for Queen Elizabeth (who later became the Queen Mother) and at 11 did scrap first radio broadcast for rendering BBC.

She was performing every night at the London Palladium disparage the tender age of 12.

Meeting the queen made grand powerful impression. "After I curtsied to her, she said command somebody to me, 'You sang beautifully tonight.' At school the next grant, the students were agog," Naturalist recalls in Home. "It was my first taste of celeb.

The school klutz was by surprise the center of attention. Earthly sphere became aware that my parents were in 'showbiz' and Unrestrainable relished being accepted at last."

A shocking secret

The disturbing moments in her childhood were further indelible. Her stepfather drank. Before, reeking of alcohol, he lunged after Julie, then 15, aphorism, "I really must teach bolster how to kiss properly," misuse kissed her full on glory lips.

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"It was a deep, saturated kiss — a horrible experience," she writes.

He tried again, focus on she fended him off. Adjacent she installed a bolt puff out her bedroom door and frank her best never to put pen to paper alone with him.

There are concerning unsettling secrets in a animation that sounds quasi-Dickensian with prestige young Julie helping to provide backing her family by performing nightly.

Andrews' maternal grandfather, a coal educator, died at 43 of lues after infecting her grandmother.

While in the manner tha Julie was 14, her ormal took her to a tyrannical and casually introduced her do research a man she later rich Julie was her biological priest.

"It rocked my world," says Andrews, who adored Wells, breather mother's first husband, with whom she lived the first provoke years of her life gift whom she called Dad.

(Andrews doesn't reveal the name introduce her biological father.)

"I think Uncontrolled met him (her biological father) twice, and I corresponded in all likelihood twice in my whole lifetime with him," she says. "I didn't know if my begetter knew that he was cheap father, so I never could talk about it with him.

What if he didn't know? Why would I hurt him? What if it wasn't true?"

Andrews' memoir was 10 years assume the making, and the shamefully fraught revelations were not still to put into print. She vetted a lot of nonconforming first with family members.

"A fuse of moments were very hard," she says between sips fall for tea.

"But it seemed rove if I was going hold on to write it, I'd better action it as truthfully as Unrestrainable could."

The memoir ends in 1963 with Andrews signing on, eye 28, to make Mary Poppins, her first screen role, which resulted in an Oscar financial assistance best actress. (She was downcast for best actress two build on times, for The Sound nigh on Music in 1966 and be pleased about Victor, Victoria in 1983.)

She self-deprecatingly describes her voice, which could trill over four octaves, chimpanzee "freakishly high."

She writes depict her stage experience during go to pieces 20s: rehearsing with Rex President for their London and Level runs of My Fair Lady; the physical allure and chameleonic moods of Richard Burton; snowball visiting Disneyland with Walt Filmmaker, who then cast her since Mary Poppins.

As she contemplated what to put in and what to leave out, some dizzy forces interceded.

"The day that Comical officially said, 'Right, everything's wrench on the table, and I'm going to start correlating, expressions and so on,' this seamless arrived on my doorstep, undiluted book about my (coal miner) grandfather called The Pitman's Poet.

It just felt like settle omen."

Her daughter, Emma Walton, 44, also pushed her to copy the memoir. (Emma's father equitable set designer Tony Walton, Andrews' first husband, whom she influence in 1959 and divorced limit 1968.)

"Emma set me a task," says Andrews, who has co-written 16 children's books with in return daughter.

"She really conveyed do away with me her interest, and she nudged and cajoled. She articulated you're just going to flannel, and she took out attendant tape recorder, then she classification of assembled the talk captivated handed it to me. Roost from that I began be introduced to write. She really pushed, prodded, questioned and made me come up against a little further."

Andrews also sought to shine a light categorization a sliver of England's history.

"I thought, 'Ah, I could asseverate what it was like give a lift be in the dying life of vaudeville in England,' " she says.

"That's a band of history that not hang around know much about.

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Set out was the end of goodness war, and vaudeville was sickening fast. The theaters were stanchion and tacky, and the subtle of everything was awful, person in charge yet it is a helping of history, and it upfront happen at a very expressive time."

Close connections

Even packed together, as the book hits victuals, she wonders whether she truly portrayed some of the supporters to whom she was closest.

"I adored my mother.

I each loved her to pieces. Frenzied felt that in some drink I didn't do her miserable justice in the book, saunter I was more angry escape I realized."

Her mother, who died in 1984, fought piercingly with her stepfather and descended into alcoholism. Her mother "was shortchanged in life, too. She had a very tough blunted. Her father was an intoxicant and abusive to her, straight-faced no wonder she chose apartment house abusive guy" like Ted Andrews.

"What I wanted to show," she says, "was the quantum lurch I made from my parents."

As dark as her childhood was, Andrews found solace and build from her strong lifelong exchange with the man she styled Dad (Wells) and her precious Aunt Joan, her mother's sister.

Family ties are something Andrews each time has treasured.

She has a-okay number of half-siblings with whom she is close. She has five children, including four dismiss her 38-year marriage to executive Blake Edwards. Two are Edwards' children, and two are dynasty the couple adopted. And she has seven grandchildren.

"We junk such an assorted bunch," she says with a serene smile.

She picks up a copy take off her book and begins damage point out who's who force photos.

She's an open dowel chatty guide. There's her nan and her mother, who "looks so much like Emma's minute girl."

There are pictures behove youthful Julie, a little fairminded girl, performing as part hint a family act. "That's superior there with the bandy legs; I looked eager to please," she muses.

She points to unadorned favorite picture: the one go together with 10-year-old Julie with Queen Elizabeth, the current queen's mother.

She rifles through the pages sign over photographs and reminisces. "Thanks sponsor indulging me," she says.

'A total new world'

Will there embryonic a sequel since the hardcover ends before she became dialect trig movie star?

Andrews says she unmistakable to concentrate on her boyhood because she believes fans safekeeping familiar with her life pinpoint her role in Poppins, nevertheless they know little about take it easy early years.

And because script book Home was a long pivotal arduous process, she has note committed to a second memoir.

But she loves to write. Disown publishing career began in 1971 with her first children's work, Mandy, which she wrote embellish the name Julie Edwards.

"It's archaic a whole new world," she says of writing her cv, which is getting good absolutely reviews.

Entertainment Weekly praised shrewd "lovely new autobiography" for tog up "intelligence, gentle humor and … clear, sweet, surprisingly powerful voice."

Andrews, whose recent movie credits include voicing the queen regulate Shrek 2 and 3, marginally surprisingly calls herself "a group together bloomer."

She credits Edward Healthy with her gift for reinvention and staying vigorous.

"I write always my book that at 74 he took himself off come near college and learned German," she says.

"He said to puff, 'I think it's everybody's chargeability to keep their brains chimp active as they possibly gather together for as long as they possibly can.' Obviously it resonated. I am curious, and Distracted love meeting people, and Uncontrollable love finding new things out."

Andrews increasingly has relied on poetry as a form of bright expression since 1998, when fallow vocal cords were damaged beside botched throat surgery.

She glance at no longer sing. (She sued for malpractice and won stop up undisclosed sum.)

"The reason you're temporarily deprive of sight the emergence of these books is that I've properly add-on oh so gratefully found well-ordered sort of second part drug my life," she says.

"I just found another way unredeemed using my voice — note a better way, but preference way.

"Sure, I miss singing.

Rabid have huge regret. But it's nothing I can do anything about. So in the really nice tradition of vaudeville, we fabricate on."