THE ‘DANGEROUS’ OLDER MAN SHE FELL FOR
ANDREWS learned quickly about men in Hollywood. She had moved there with first husband Tony Walton and their daughter Emma but the couple drifted apart because of work. She was making The Sound Of Music as they were heading towards divorce. To save her marrage, she reveals in her memoir, Home Work, she saw a psychoanalyst and briefly thought about giving up acting and singing. As she was leaving the therapist’s office one day, she met her next husband, Blake Edwards, while he was driving through LA in his Rolls. ‘I was trying very hard not to fall in love with him,’ she says of the director of Breakfast At Tiffany’s and the Pink Panther films. ‘He was devastingly funny, wicked even, but there was something dangerous about him.’ He was 13 years her senior and it took her two years to agree to marry him, in 1969. Between them, they had five children — Emma, Edwards’s two, Jennifer and Geoffrey, and two adopted Vietnamese girls, Amy and Joanna. Andrews became a real-life nanny with Blake, who was beset by gall bladder problems, chest pains, infectious mononucleosis (called ‘the kissing disease’), back pain and flu. ‘Yes, very stressful times, always,’ she says. They were together until his death from pneumonia in 2010.