Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
As we filmed cap they told me ‘Gre I saw the poor ch
didn’t deserve it, and that perhaps it had been given to me as a kind gesture because I hadn’t been cast in My Fair Lady,” she writes modestly of the Oscar.
At the ceremony, Audrey herself told her: “Julie, you really should have done My Fair Lady... but I didn’t have the guts to turn it down.”
However Julie’s performance in Mary Poppins won her the role that defined her career, Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
Amazingly she was worried about being typecast as another nanny.
She had seen The Sound of Music on Broadway and wasn’t a fan of its “saccharine” storyline.
Julie’s agent encouraged her to accept the part. The film was shot on location in Austria.
Possibly the biggest challenge came in the boating scene, where Maria and her charges sing as they fall out of their boat into a lake.
Julie says: “The assistant director waded rather urgently through the water towards me and whispered, ‘The little one can’t swim...’ ‘WHAT?!’
“‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’d be most grateful if you could get to her as quickly as possible once you’re in the water’.
“In the second take, the boat rocked so violently that I went over the back as Kym [the child actor playing Gretl] went over the front.
“I have never swum so fast in my life. I could see the poor child flailing away and going under at least twice.
“Crew members dove into the water to help save her, and mercifully we got there in time.”
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