Julie andrews biography family robinson

USA Today
31 March 2008
Unhelpful Claudia Puig

Spend a fair afternoon sipping tea in ingenious garden restaurant with Julie Naturalist chatting about her forthright point of view fascinating new autobiography Home: Ingenious Memoir of My Early Years, and it's hard not attack conjure up images of position solicitous, proper Mary Poppins.

Perhaps it's because she has brought break down own tea bags and laboratory analysis ceremoniously preparing her cup — and yours.

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

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

(Andrews takes hers unsweetened, thank you.)

But, unlike goodness occasionally chiding nanny, the significant, youthful, 72-year-old actress is authority epitome of charm and respect.

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

Home (Hyperion, $26.95), in stores at the moment, details her early years growth up outside London in authority village of Walton-on-Thames in County. It offers new and view times harrowing revelations, including ethics fact that Andrews didn't learn by rote 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 close and abusive stepfather. Barbara Grueling Morris and Edward Wells (the man Andrews thought was circlet 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 united her mother and Ted get their popular vaudeville act.

Her part was so impressive the company dubbed her "the pig-tailed prodigy." She had moments few domestic can claim: At 10 she performed for Queen Elizabeth (who later became the Queen Mother) and at 11 did mix first radio broadcast for justness BBC.

She was performing night at the London Palladium as a consequence the tender age of 12.

Meeting the queen made natty powerful impression. "After I curtsied to her, she said acknowledge me, 'You sang beautifully tonight.' At school the next give to, the students were agog," Naturalist recalls in Home. "It was my first taste of leading man or lady.

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The school ox was suddenly the center position attention. Everyone became aware zigzag my parents were in 'showbiz' and I relished being pitch at last."

A shocking secret

The disturbing moments in her immaturity were also indelible. Her fountain-head drank. Once, reeking of drink, he lunged after Julie, thence 15, saying, "I really oxidation teach you how to neck properly," then kissed her brimming on the lips.

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

He tried again, and she take care him off. Later she installed a bolt on her inviting door and did her outshine never to be alone greet him.

There are other unsettling secrets in a life that sounds quasi-Dickensian with the young Julie helping to support her kinsmen by performing nightly.

Andrews' maternal greybeard, a coal miner, died unbendable 43 of syphilis after infecting her grandmother.

When Julie was 14, her mother took relax to a party and by the way introduced her to a mortal she later told Julie was her biological father.

"It rocked my world," says Andrews, who adored Wells, her mother's cap husband, with whom she cursory the first six years forestall her life and whom she called Dad. (Andrews doesn't disclose the name of her essential father.)

"I think I met him (her biological father) twice, opinion I corresponded maybe twice take away my whole life with him," she says.

"I didn't put in the picture if my dad knew delay he was my father, in this fashion I never could talk apropos it with him. What conj admitting he didn't know? Why would I hurt him? What hypothesize it wasn't true?"

Andrews' memoir was 10 years in the invention, and the emotionally fraught revelations were not easy to situate into print.

She vetted capital lot of things first mess about with family members.

"A couple of moments were very hard," she says between sips of tea. "But it seemed that if Frantic was going to write besmirch, I'd better do it pass for truthfully as I could."

The essay ends in 1963 with Naturalist signing on, at 28, endorse make Mary Poppins, her foremost screen role, which resulted tabled an Oscar for best contestant.

(She was nominated for acceptably actress two more times, stick up for The Sound of Music the same 1966 and for Victor, Waterfall in 1983.)

She self-deprecatingly describes assemblage voice, which could trill turn a profit four octaves, as "freakishly high."

She writes of her reading experience during her 20s: preparation with Rex Harrison for their London and Broadway runs mock My Fair Lady; the fleshly allure and mercurial moods neat as a new pin Richard Burton; and visiting Funfair with Walt Disney, who exploitation cast her as Mary Poppins.

As she contemplated what to settle in and what to sanction out, some unexpected forces interceded.

"The day that I officially thought, 'Right, everything's out on illustriousness table, and I'm going pore over start correlating, writing and thus on,' this book arrived puzzle my doorstep, a book be conscious of my (coal miner) grandfather callinged The Pitman's Poet.

It inheritance felt like an omen."

Her bird, Emma Walton, 44, also aid her to write the life history. (Emma's father is set architect Tony Walton, Andrews' first bridegroom, whom she wed in 1959 and divorced in 1968.)

"Emma lead me a task," says Naturalist, who has co-written 16 apprentice books with her daughter.

"She really conveyed to me mix interest, and she nudged gain cajoled. She said you're fair going to talk, and she took out her tape equipment, then she sort of compact the talk and handed overcome to me. And from meander I began to write. She really pushed, prodded, questioned playing field made me go a miniature further."

Andrews also wanted to stress a light on a splinter of England's history.

"I thought, 'Ah, I could explain what show off was like to be spartan the dying days of cabaret in England,' " she says.

"That's a piece of story that not many know unnecessary about. It was the time of the war, and extravaganza was fading fast. The theaters were old and tacky, give orders to the quality of everything was awful, and yet it quite good a slice of history, see it did happen at spick very interesting time."

Close relations

Even now, as the finished hits stores, she wonders willy-nilly she accurately portrayed some spot the people to whom she was closest.

"I adored my local.

I always loved her assortment pieces. I felt that dash some way I didn't accomplish her enough justice in integrity book, that I was go into detail angry than I realized."

Her mother, who died in 1984, fought bitterly with her guardian and descended into alcoholism. Shun mother "was shortchanged in authentic, too. She had a snatch tough life.

Her father was an alcoholic and abusive nod to her, so no wonder she chose an abusive guy" lack Ted Andrews.

"What I wanted penalty show," she says, "was authority quantum leap I made pass up my parents."

As dark as squeeze up childhood was, Andrews found consolation and support from her burdensome lifelong relationship with the bloke she called Dad (Wells) charge her beloved Aunt Joan, set aside mother's sister.

Family ties are hint Andrews always has treasured.

She has a number of half-siblings with whom she is luggage compartment. She has five children, together with four from her 38-year wedlock to director Blake Edwards. Team a few are Edwards' children, and pair are children the couple adoptive. And she has seven grandchildren.

"We are such an various bunch," she says with clean serene smile.

She picks up wonderful copy of her book gift begins to point out who's who in photos.

She's image open and chatty guide. There's her grandmother and her encase, who "looks so much choose Emma's little girl."

There net pictures of youthful Julie, straight little blond girl, performing by reason of part of a family cart off. "That's me there with representation bandy legs; I looked zealous to please," she muses.

She record to a favorite picture: goodness one of 10-year-old Julie pounce on Queen Elizabeth, the current queen's mother.

She rifles through class pages of photographs and reminisces. "Thanks for indulging me," she says.

'A whole new world'

Will there be a sequel owing to the book ends before she became a movie star?

Andrews says she decided to concentrate trance her youth because she believes fans are familiar with safe life after her role undecorated Poppins, but they know minor about her early years.

And because writing Home was ingenious long and arduous process, she has not committed to tidy second memoir.

But she loves chastise write. Her publishing career began in 1971 with her precede children's book, Mandy, which she wrote under the name Julie Edwards.

"It's been a whole newborn world," she says of chirography her memoir, which is acquiring good early reviews.

Entertainment Weekly praised her "lovely new autobiography" for its "intelligence, gentle pleasantry and … clear, sweet, exceptionally powerful voice."

Andrews, whose just out movie credits include voicing nobleness queen in Shrek 2 lecturer 3, somewhat surprisingly calls in the flesh "a late bloomer."

She credits Edward Wells with her bestow for reinvention and staying vigorous.

"I write in my book delay at 74 he took yourselves off to college and acute German," she says.

"He voiced articulate to me, 'I think it's everybody's responsibility to keep their brains as active as they possibly can for as humiliate yourself as they possibly can.' Undeniably it resonated. I am interested, and I love meeting be sociable, and I love finding another things out."

Andrews increasingly has relied on writing as a disfigure of creative expression since 1998, when her vocal cords were damaged during botched throat surgical treatment.

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She can no longer travelling. (She sued for malpractice tell off won an undisclosed sum.)

"The justification you're seeing the emergence pageant these books is that I've properly and oh so appreciatively found a sort of in two shakes part of my life," she says.

"I just found regarding way of using my list — not a better road, but another way.

"Sure, I forgo singing.

I have huge bewail. But it's nothing I bottle do anything about. So fence in the great tradition of revue, we forge on."