THE JULIE DIARIES
Her emotional new memoir
Dame Julie Andrews is in a reflective mood. With the upcoming release of her second memoir Home Work, the beloved star is dishing on some of the more surprising aspects of her life – and it’s not all raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens.
From surviving a violent and alcoholic stepfather in the slums of 1940s London, her childhood performing vaudeville with her parents, and her big break playing everyone’s favourite magical nanny Mary Poppins, right through to the trauma of losing her singing voice after a botched operation, divorce, and the death of her soulmate Blake Edwards, it’s no wonder she says therapy saved her life.
“Sadly, I separated from my lovely first husband. The marriage was over and my head was so full of clutter and garbage,” says Julie (84). “I went and got into [therapy] and it saved my life in a way. These days there’s no harm in sharing it.
“It was one of those a-ha moments, believe me. When my therapist said, ‘Good God, woman, don’t you want to be happy?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, ah, well, um…’ My mother had always said to me, ‘Don’t you dare get a swollen head. Don’t you dare think you’re the best.’ Over time, I got over that.”
It’s been an emotional time for Julie, who co-wrote the book with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton (56) from journals she kept right through her Hollywood career. The family involvement has meant a lot of laughs, tears and “endless cups of tea” between the two women.
“Thank God for my wonderful daughter Emma, who helped me so much,” Julie says.
“She pressed me and interviewed me, in a way, and made me talk about things. There are certain things, I guess, that a mother doesn’t want to open up about, but she said, ‘Mum, we are two equal women these days, let’s make a pact to be absolutely frank… and some of it was very painful to write about.”
Among those things is what she still calls her life’s “biggest disappointment” – losing her singing voice after an attempt to remove nodules from her throat.
“That was just an extremely, acutely painful time. Not physically, but emotionally.
The thing that I felt defined me, always, was that I’m a soprano. I could sing. I loved it and learned to enjoy it very much, and then of course it literally wasn’t there anymore.
“And finally I thought, if I don’t do something else, I’m going to go crazy. Because I’m not one to ever just be idle. I’m far too curious and interested.”
That next chapter was literally books – she wrote her first memoir and 30 children’s books with Emma, and her career experienced a renaissance with roles in films such as Shrek and The Princess Diaries.
But it took Julie a long time to feel she was worthy of the love and affection the world has thrown at her since she took hold of that famous umbrella – she even kept the Oscar she won for Mary Poppins in her attic so people didn’t think she was showing off.
“It does seem rather ridiculous, and I do proudly display it now, but at the time I was in such a new crowd. I didn’t want to boast. I didn’t want to be like, ‘Come see my Oscar!’ So it was hard.”
And just a few years after the success of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music – which she almost didn’t do as she worried about playing another nanny – Julie’s marriage to Tony Walton crumbled, a time in her life that she describes as horrendous.
“I do look back on it and think, ‘Did I make the right choices?’ I think he did too. He’s kindly read the book and is very encouraging of it, and it is what it is,” she says, adding that she and Tony remained close friends following their split.
After that pain, she met “the love of my life”, Blake Edwards, to whom she was married for 30 years until his death from pneumonia in 2010. She was deeply in love, despite his battles with prescription drugs.
“He was the most charismatic, mercurial gentleman I’d ever encountered,” she says.
“I still miss him so dreadfully. They broke the mould when Blake was born. At times he was extremely compassionate about other people. He was also very, very difficult at times.
“And it was an interesting time for me because I was learning so much, not just about the business but about myself in therapy and my husband. It was all this wild rollercoaster ride.”