In Hollywood, sometimes familiarity breeds contempt. For Dame Julie Andrews—who turns 90 on 1 October—the extraordinary cultural impact of her first two films, Mary Poppins (1964) and especially The Sound of Music (1965), was the climax of a decade-long rise to fame, but one which peaked too quickly. She had made her Broadway debut in The Boy Friend (1954) and went on to star in the most successful show of the decade, My Fair Lady (1956). Television appearances including the starring role in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella (1957)—said to be the most-watched event in American TV history, with over 100 million viewers—and partnering with comedienne Carol Burnett for the Emmy Award-winning Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall (1962) led to more fame. During her return to Broadway in Camelot (1960) opposite Richard Burton, she was spotted by Walt Disney for Mary Poppins, leading to her Academy Award for Best Actress, and the rest is history.
The Demise of the Hollywood Musical
Yet the saturation of The Sound of Music across British and American society led to a fixed image that made it difficult for Andrews to thrive. Her excellent performance in the anti-war drama The Americanization of Emily (1964) was overlooked because of the success of her two ‘nanny musicals’. Her follow-up 1960s musicals were successively less successful: Thoroughly Modern Millie (1967) performed adequately, but Star! (1968) and Darling Lili (1970) were box office bombs, the latter apparently losing over $20 million and confirming that the musical was over. Within just a few years, Dame Julie had gone from the toast of the town to a financial risk, reflecting the rapid fall of grace of the film musical of whom she was the 1960s’ greatest star. Where could she go from here?
Andrews the actress
When I was asked to come up with suggestions for a strand of Widescreen Weekend to celebrate Andrews’ 90th birthday, I was keen to celebrate aspects of her career that aren’t so well known, and in particular the non-singing roles that she incorporated into her career to show her versatility. In 1966, she made two such films. Hawaii is an epic showing the destruction of colonialism in Hawaiian islands that deserves consideration for inclusion at a future Widescreen Weekend, but we’ve chosen Torn Curtain to show what happened when the Queen of the Musical worked with the Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock.
Although this Cold War thriller was famously rushed into production to fit into Dame Julie’s hectic schedule, from the very beginning of the movie we can see how she is already trying to push against the image people expected from Mary Poppins: she is shown in bed with Paul Newman, and their characters are not married. The initial chunk of the film is significantly seen from her character’s perspective, as she wonders whether Newman’s character is about to defect to East Germany and decides to pursue him. Despite the film’s flaws, it’s intriguing to see Andrews’ contemporary, adult performance.
Performing disability
After the disaster of Darling Lili, Andrews mainly appeared in movies directed by her second husband, the great Blake Edwards: another thriller, The Tamarind Seed (1974), 10 (1979) and S.O.B. (1981). This was not a prolific output for someone who had been the great box office draw of the mid-1960s. But the recalibration of her career into genres other than the musical meant that Dame Julie’s range as an actress was more and more on show.
I’m excited to see Duet for One (1986), one of the most obscure and curious movies she has made. It’s an adaptation of a play about a celebrated violinist who is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis and has to come to terms with the end of her life as an artist, which coincides with the break-up of her marriage. The film includes Alan Bates, Rupert Everett and Liam Neeson, and is a compelling portrayal of a performer in psychological crisis. What makes it even more poignantly compelling is the knowledge that a decade later, botched vocal surgery brought Andrews’s own singing career to an end, life mirroring art with painful verisimilitude.
Queer icon
Dame Julie has always been a favourite of the queer community, and the last film in our strand features a queer performance of her own: her final screen musical, Victor/Victoria (1982). Here, Andrews appears in Blake Edwards’ own adaptation of the 1933 German film Viktor und Viktoria, playing a soprano who becomes a female impersonator to revive her desperate career. The gender-bending plot spoke closely to Dame Julie’s queer audience, enhanced by the camp performances of Broadway stalwarts Robert Preston and Lesley Ann Warren. With a score by veteran Henry Mancini, the movie proves that Andrews still had the ability to be part of a successful screen musical—at a time when the genre was mostly dead.
Beyond The Sound of Music?
Julie Andrews’s extraordinary performance as Maria von Trapp continues to define her career, six decades on from its original release. Yet beyond The Sound of Music, there is plenty more to enjoy of her career, including the autobiographical That’s Life (1986), her TV reunion with Sound of Music co-star Christopher Plummer in On a Golden Pond (2001), the gritty AIDS drama Our Sons (1991) and of course her appearances in The Princess Diaries (2001–4) that led a whole new generation of viewers to fall in love with her warmth and intelligence as an actress. It’s a testament to her abilities that she made the last sixty years really count as an artist, and her three movies in this year’s Widescreen Weekend give us a welcome chance to re-evaluate her versatility as a performer.