telegraph.co.uk/ 23/03/2005
After almost 60 years, an aura of magic still surrounds Julie Andrews, our most irresistible showbiz trouper, says Sarah Crompton
Most people have strong views about Julie Andrews. They love her - or they hate her. Perhaps it says something about my friends that when they heard I was about to meet her when she came to London to see Mary Poppins on stage for the first time, they nearly all jumped around with unmitigated delight.
I'm definitely in the pro-camp. I adored Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music when I was a child, and I still enjoy watching them with my children. Having met their star, now almost 70, the magic persists: Andrews is so unfailingly, punctiliously courteous it is hard not to warm to her.
But there is steel there, too: the strong backbone of a girl on stage since childhood; a firm determination not to disappoint. So, last week, when she swept into the Prince Edward Theatre, she was regal and smiling. This was the theatre where she had her first starring role at the age of 12 as the egg in Humpty Dumpty. Fifty seven years later, people had given an astonishing £600,000 to charity to be in the same auditorium as her, and she was going to put on a great show once again.
"Oh wow, it's Mary Poppins," said a child lucky enough to see her heroine's arrival in glittering black and a battery of flash bulbs. "You wanna see the real Mary Poppins. Well, there she is," said another fan, hugging her daughter close to share the magic.
The words I scribbled in my notebook at that moment were "What a trouper!" because Julie Andrews definitely belongs to that showbiz tradition where chorus girls go out as nobodies and come back as stars and where the show must always go on.
At the end of the gala performance, as the new Mary Poppins (Laura Michelle Kelly) flew away, she smiled at the original sitting below her. "That was the moment that got to me," Andrews told me afterwards. But five minutes later she was on stage herself, giving a witty and gracious speech about a fantastic evening and batons being passed to a new generation.
It had been, she said "Supercali…" and she signed, just as the cast had done early in the show, the letters for the famous superlative. And then, she sang, joining in a prearranged chorus of "It's a jolly holiday…" There was barely a dry eye in the house. What a trouper!
Because, of course, Julie Andrews can't really sing any more. That staggering, clear-as-a-bell, four-octave voice vanished in a botched operation in 1997. Now, she says, she has "about five" bass notes left.
"There is huge regret and sadness I can't sing," she told me. "I wish with all my heart that I could. I miss the deep, deep pleasure of singing with an orchestra."
When she consoles herself with the thought that this happened to her at a time when "I might not be singing as much anyway" you can't help feeling that such comfort has been hard-won. Yet the instinct to pick yourself up and start all over again is also part of the showbiz tradition in which she grew up.
Much of her taste seems conditioned by her affection for those vaudeville days. She roars with surprisingly raucous laughter when recounting her favourite line from The Producers: "The first rule is never put your money in the show. The second is NEVER PUT YOUR MONEY IN THE SHOW."
Her favourite Sondheim musical is A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which is essentially a vaudeville pastiche. Her favourite song in Mary Poppins is Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious "because it was knock-down, drag-out vaudeville, and for me nothing like it had ever been done and it was fun to do, fun to be silly and just kick up our heels."
When she finally gets around to writing her long-promised autobiography, she wants to concentrate on the early days when she worked with everyone from Max Wall to Max Bygreaves. She was 12 when she scored her first big success - "this adult voice in a kid" - in a revue called Starlight Roof. Since then, she has never really stopped working, finding success on Broadway in The Boyfriend, My Fair Lady and Camelot - and then launching into films with Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music.
It is an extraordinary trajectory and the toughness of her days as a child star must have lent her the strength to keep up with the opportunities offered to her. This is particularly true of Mary Poppins. It was her first film, and, if you watch the extras on the new DVD released to mark its 40th anniversary, what you see is a smiling girl sitting on piles of crates, surrounded by black screens, waiting around for the animators to be happy everything was perfect.
"It was," she told me, "the best acting lesson and the best lesson about film you could ever have had. It taught me the virtue of patience which you really need on any movie - and it was jolly difficult to pretend to be looking at a penguin when there was nothing there."
The thing she found hardest, she says, was the heat. "We rehearsed under a black tarpaulin on the back lot. It was meant to give us shade… but the heat in the San Fernando Valley was searing. We all trimmed up and sweated out so much, it got us into great shape. But the heat for me was really telling - quite an ordeal."
What she doesn't mention, until I ask her about it, was that she had just had a baby with her first husband Tony Walton, a daughter who was only three months old when they started shooting. She must have been exhausted. But that's not how she remembers it: "She'd come on the set, and I'd do some feeding. It was dear. It was a very happy time."
That anecdote tells you a lot of what you need to know about Julie Andrews. She is sweet - and she is very strong. She is one of the finest products of a British showbiz tradition that made them that way. And we are not going to see her like again.
© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2005.
