“You can literally feel the evil that once permeated those walls,” she recalls. By then, she already had another massive musical hit, “The Sound of Music.” The most interesting part of that production for her was traveling to Austria to shoot on location, where she was moved by the beauty of the mountains and chilled to learn about the Himmler connection to the villa.

She recalls Disney in glowing terms - “always very encouraging and full of bonhomie” - and learned, to her amazement, about the daunting amount of editing, re-recording of dialogue and other tinkering that a major production required to get into theaters.Īndrews’ debut film earned her a lead actress Oscar in 1965. Of all her films, “Mary Poppins” gets the most lavish, detailed description in “Home Work,” from the ballet-influenced walk she developed for her character, to the advice she gave Van Dyke as he struggled to approximate a cockney accent. ( Marni Nixon, the famous Hollywood “ghost singer,” did the actual vocals in the film.) But Andrews says she ultimately felt grateful for the snub, because it enabled her to star in “Mary Poppins.” Andrews’ performance in “Cinderella” at the London Palladium was so good she got an offer to cross the Atlantic and play the lead role in a Broadway production of “The Boy Friend,” just before her 19th birthday.Ĭarol Burnett, left, and Julie Andrews reunited for TV special “Julie and Carol: Together Again.” (ITV/Shutterstock)Īndrews admits she was unhappy about being passed over for the role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of “My Fair Lady,” in favor of non-singer Audrey Hepburn. She was saved by the grace of her talent, which led producers to cast her in British musical theater. The young Andrews, who never had time for an education, said she feared for her future in British vaudeville’s dying days.

By the time she was a teenager, she had become her family’s main means of support, roaming England and trying to cheer up dreary dressing rooms with a bunch of flowers between twice-an-evening performances in smoke-filled halls full of inebriated adults. “Home Work” is the story of an ordinary person blessed with extraordinary gifts, including a soaring, angelic soprano voice, whose big struggle was to maintain that normalcy in a Hollywood rife with exploitation and excess.Īs detailed in her previous book, 2008’s “ Home: A Memoir of My Early Years,” Andrews got her start in show business at age just before her tenth birthday, standing on a beer crate to reach the microphone as she sang in her mother and stepfather’s vaudeville act.

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