Dame Julie Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (born Julia Elizabeth Wells on 1 October 1935) is an award-winning British actress, singer, author and cultural icon. She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People's Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honors. Andrews rose to prominence after starring in Broadway musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, as well as musical films like Mary Poppins (1964) and The Sound of Music (1965).

Andrews had a major revival of her film career in the 2000s, in children's films such as The Princess Diaries (2001), its sequel The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004), and the Shrek animated films (2004-2007). In 2005, Andrews made her debut as a stage director with a revival of The Boy Friend, in which she also made her Broadway acting debut in 1954.

Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells on 1 October 1935 in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, the daughter of Edward C. "Ted" Wells, a teacher of metal and woodworking, and Barbara Wells (née Morris), who played piano at her sister Joan's dance school. It was at this Aunt Joan's dance school that the two-year-old Julia had her first non-speaking role as a fairy, then at age three the singing and speaking role of Nod in a production of Winken, Blinken, and Nod.

In 1939, Barbara Wells met Ted Andrews (died 1966) while both worked for a variety show called The Dazzle Company at the seaside resort town of Bognor Regis. A Vaudeville-style entertainer who emigrated to England from Canada, Ted Andrews was billed as "The Canadian Troubador, Songs and a Guitar".

With the outbreak of World War II, Barbara and Ted Wells went their separate ways. Ted Wells assisted with the evacuation of children in Surrey during the Blitz, while Barbara joined Ted Andrews in entertaining the troops through the good offices of the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). Barbara and Ted Wells were soon divorced; they both remarried - Barbara to Ted Andrews in 1939, and Ted Wells to a former hairstylist working a lathe at a war factory that employed them both in Hinchley Wood, Surrey.

Julia Wells lived briefly with her father and her brother John Wells in Surrey. About 1940, her father sent her to live with her mother and stepfather, who (her father felt) would be better able to provide for his talented daughter's artistic training. While her mother wanted Julia to call Ted Andrews "Uncle Ted", she determined to refer to her stepfather as "Pop", while her father remained "Dad" or "Daddy" to her. Julia Wells's surname was legally changed to Andrews around this time.

The Andrews family was "very poor and we lived in a bad slum area of London," Andrews said, adding, "That was a very black period in my life." But as the stage career of Ted and Barbara Andrews grew in popularity, they were able to afford to move to better surroundings, first to Beckenham, and then, as the war ended, back to Andrews' home town of Walton-on-Thames. The Andrews took up residence at The Old Meuse, a house where Andrews' maternal grandmother happened to have served as a maid. Andrews' father sponsored lessons for his daughter, first at the Cone-Ripman School, then with the famous concert soprano and voice instructor Madame Lilian Stiles-Allen. "She had an enormous influence on me," Andrews said of Mme Stiles-Allen, adding, "She was my third mother -- I've got more mothers and fathers than anyone in the world." Andrews developed a strong voice and perfect pitch.

Andrews performed spontaneously and unbilled on stage with her parents for about two years beginning in 1945. "Then came the day when I was told I must go to bed in the afternoon because I was going to be allowed to sing with Mummy and Pop in the evening," Andrews explained. She would stand on a beer crate to reach the microphone and sing while her mother played piano, sometimes a solo or as a duet with her stepfather. "It must have been ghastly, but it seemed to go down all right."

Andrews got her big break when her stepfather introduced her to Val Parnell, whose Moss Empires controlled prominent venues in London. Andrews made her professional solo debut at the London Hippodrome singing the difficult "Je Suis Titania" aria from Mignon as part of a musical revue called "Starlight Roof" on 22 October 1947. She played the Hippodrome for one year. See List of former child actors.

On 1 November 1948, Andrews became the youngest solo performer ever to be seen in a Royal Command Variety Performance, at the London Palladium, where she performed along with Danny Kaye, the Nicholas Brothers, and the comedy team George and Bert Bernard for members of King George VI's family.

Andrews followed her parents into radio and television. She reportedly made her television debut on the BBC program RadiOlympia Showtime on 8 October, 1949.. She garnered considerable fame throughout England for her work on the BBC radio show "Educating Archie", which she played from 1950 to 1952.

Andrews appeared on West End Theatre at the London Casino, where she played one year each as Princess Balroulbadour in Aladdin and the egg in Humpty Dumpty. She also appeared on provincial stages across England in Jack and the Beanstalk and Little Red Riding Hood, as well as starring as the lead role in Cinderella.

On 30 September 1954, on the eve of her 19th birthday, Andrews made her Broadway debut portraying "Polly Browne" in the already highly successful London musical The Boy Friend. To the critics, Andrews was the stand-out performer in the show.

In November 1955, Andrews was signed to appear opposite Bing Crosby in what is regarded as the first made-for-television movie, High Tor.

In 1956, she appeared in the Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay Lerner musical My Fair Lady as Eliza Doolittle, opposite Rex Harrison's Henry Higgins. The show was a musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion and became the smash hit of the decade. Andrews was a sensation.

Before My Fair Lady, Andrews had auditioned for but not received a part in the Richard Rodgers play Pipe Dream. Rodgers wanted her for "Pipe Dream" but advised her to take the part in "My Fair Lady" if she was offered it, rather than the part in "Pipe Dream". Rodgers was so impressed with Andrews' talent that, concurrent with her run in My Fair Lady, Andrews was featured in the Rodgers and Hammerstein television musical, Cinderella. Cinderella was broadcast live on CBS on March 31, 1957 under the musical direction of Alfredo Antonini and attracted an estimated 107 million viewers.

Andrews married Tony Walton on 5 May 1959 in Weybridge, Surrey. They had first met in 1948 when Andrews was appearing at the London Casino in the show Humpty Dumpty. Andrews filed for divorce on 14 November 1967.

In 1960, Lerner and Loewe again cast her in a period musical, as Queen Guinevere in Camelot, opposite Richard Burton and newcomer Robert Goulet. After a slow start, cast appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show ensured that the show would ultimately become a hit.

Rave Broadway reviews aside, movie studio head Jack Warner felt Andrews lacked broad name recognition, so he hired film actress Audrey Hepburn to play Eliza for the film version of My Fair Lady. As Warner later recalled, the decision was easy. "In my business I have to know who brings people and their money to a movie theatre box office. Audrey Hepburn had never made a financial flop." Ironically, Hepburn's singing voice would be judged inadequate and would be overdubbed by Marni Nixon.

Andrews received the "consolation" of playing her first film in the title role of Walt Disney's Mary Poppins. Walt Disney had seen a performance of Camelot and thought Andrews would be perfect for the role of an English nanny who is "practically perfect in every way!" Andrews initially declined due to pregnancy, but Disney politely insisted, saying, "We'll wait for you." Andrews and her husband headed back to England in September 1962 to await the birth of daughter Emma Kate Walton, who was born in London two months later. Andrews and family returned to America in 1963 and began the film.

As a result of her performance in Mary Poppins, Andrews won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Actress and the 1965 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She and her Mary Poppins co-stars also won the 1965 Grammy Award for Best Album for Children. As a measure of "sweet revenge," as Poppins songwriter Richard M. Sherman put it, Andrews closed her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes by saying, "And, finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie, and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner."

In 1964, she appeared opposite James Garner in The Americanization of Emily (1964), which she has described as her favorite film. Andrews was nominated for the 1965 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music. The movie also starred actors Christopher Plummer and Charmian Carr. The role had some superficial similarities to that of Mary Poppins.

By the end of 1967, Andrews had appeared in the most-watched television special, Cinderella; the biggest Broadway musical of its time, My Fair Lady; the largest-selling long-playing album, the original cast recording of My Fair Lady; the biggest hit in Disney's history, Mary Poppins; the biggest and second biggest hits in Universal's history, Thoroughly Modern Millie and Torn Curtain; and the biggest hit in 20th Century Fox's history and the most successful film of all time, The Sound of Music. This distinction is unmatched by any other performer in history.

Star!, a 1968 biopic of Gertrude Lawrence, and Darling Lili (1970), co-starring Rock Hudson and directed by her second husband, Blake Edwards (they married in 1969), are often cited by critics as major contributors to the decline of the movie musical. Both were damaging to Andrews' career and she made only three other films in the 1970s, The Tamarind Seed, Little Miss Marker and 10.

She starred in her own variety series on the ABC network in 1972 - 1973, winning 7 Emmy Awards. Canceled after one season, Julie joined the ranks of other musical superstars such as Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole and Judy Garland, whose personalities proved too large for the small screen. Julie's greatest critical acclaim accorded her TV work was for her Carnegie Hall special with her close friend Carol Burnett.

Several of her 1980s films were seen as attempts to break away from her image as a "sugary sweet" personality. Most notoriously was Blake Edwards's S.O.B. (1981), in which she played Sally Miles, a character very similar to herself, who agrees (with some pharmaceutical persuasion) to "show my boobies" in a scene in the film-within-a-film. For this last performance, late night television host Johnny Carson thanked Andrews for "showing us that the hills were still alive," alluding to a lyric from the title song of The Sound of Music.

In 1983, Andrews was chosen as the Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year by the Harvard University theatrical society. The roles of Victoria Grant and Count Victor Grezhinski in the film Victor/Victoria earned Andrews the 1983 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy, as well as a nomination for the 1982 Academy Award for Best Actress, her third Oscar nomination overall.

In 1993, she starred in a limited run at the Manhattan Theatre Club, of the American premiere of Stephen Sondheim's revue, Putting It Together. The show sold out immediately and proved that there was tremendous interest in seeing her return to the New York stage. In 1995, she starred in the commercially successful stage musical version of Victor/Victoria. It was her first appearance in a Broadway show in 35 years. Opening on Broadway on 25 October 1995 at the Marquis Theatre, it later went on the road on a very successful world tour. When she was the only Tony Award nominee for the production, she declined the nomination, saying that she could not accept because she felt the entire production was snubbed. Andrews was forced to quit the show towards the end of the Broadway run, when she developed vocal problems. She subsequently underwent surgery to remove non-cancerous nodules from her throat and was left unable to sing. In 1999, Andrews filed a medical malpractice lawsuit against the doctors at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, including Stuart Kessler, who had operated on her throat. Originally, the doctors assured Andrews that she should regain her voice within six weeks, but Andrews' stepdaughter Jennifer Edwards said "it's been two years, and it [her singing voice] still hasn't returned."

In the 2000 New Year's Honours, despite Andrews's long exile in the United States and Switzerland, she was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire (DBE). She also appears in the 2002 List of "100 Greatest Britons" sponsored by the BBC and chosen by the public. In 2001, Andrews received Kennedy Center Honors. The same year, she reunited with Sound of Music costar Christopher Plummer in a live television performance of On Golden Pond.

In 2001, Andrews appeared in The Princess Diaries, her first Disney film since 1964's Mary Poppins. The film, in which she starred as Queen Clarisse Marie Renaldi opposite Anne Hathaway, was a box office success and was followed by a sequel, The Princess Diaries 2 (2004). In The Princess Diaries 2, Andrews sang on film for the first time since her throat surgery. The song, "Your Crowning Glory," was set in a limited range of an octave and a major third to accommodate Andrews' recovering voice. The film's music supervisor Dawn Soler recalled that Andrews "nailed the song on the first take. I looked around and I saw grips with tears in their eyes."

Andrews continued her association with Disney when she appeared as Nanny in two 2003 made-for-television movies based on the Eloise books, a series of children's books by Kay Thompson about a child who lives in the Plaza Hotel in New York City. Eloise at the Plaza premiered in April 2003, and Eloise at Christmastime was broadcast in November 2003. The same year, Andrews made her debut as a theatre director, directing a revival of The Boy Friend, the musical in which she made her Broadway debut, at the Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York. Her production, which featured costume and scenic design by her former husband Tony Walton, was remounted at the Goodspeed Opera House in 2005 and went on a national tour in 2006.

From 2005 to 2006, Andrews served as the Official Ambassador for Disneyland's 18 month-long, 50th anniversary celebration, the "Happiest Homecoming on Earth", traveling to promote the celebration and recording narration or appearing at several events at the park.

In 2004, Andrews performed the voice of Queen Lillian in the animated blockbuster Shrek 2 (2004), reprising the role for its sequel, Shrek the Third (2007). Later in 2007, she narrated Enchanted, a live-action Disney musical comedy that paid homage to classic Disney films such as Mary Poppins.

In January 2007, she was honored with the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Screen Actors Guild's awards, and stated that her goals including continuing to direct for the stage, and possibly to produce her own Broadway musical. She will publish Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, which she characterized as "part one" of her autobiography, on April 1, 2008. Home will chronicle her early years in England's Music Hall circuit, and end with her winning the role of Mary Poppins.

Julie Andrews has long had something of a dual image, being both a family-friendly icon and an icon for gays and lesbians. According to cultural studies scholar Brett Farmer, she "... is notable as one of the few divas to enjoy a parallel popularization across both gay and lesbian reading formations." Andrews herself has acknowledged her strange status, commenting that "I’m that odd mixture of, on the one hand, being a gay icon and, on the other, having grandmas and parents grateful I’m around to be a babysitter for their kids. . . " She has frequently appeared as a formative presence and signifier in narratives of homosexual identity, notably in The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire, Does Freddy Dance and Widescreen Dreams: Growing Up Gay at the Movies, and in May 2007, ranked 25th in a major poll ranking top gay icons.

There is notable investment in the films that cemented her alleged "sugary sweet" image, as much as, if not more, than in Victor/Victoria. The Sound of Music has long been a gay favorite, and its recent Singalong incarnation was originally created for London's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 1999. Recent gender/cultural studies writers such as Stacy Wolf and Peter Kemp have argued for a different reading of the image projected by her two most famous films, Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music, as that of a transgressive, subversive and life-changing force, rather than a sugary nanny committed to keeping the traditional status quo. Stacy Wolf's book, A Problem Like Maria - Gender and Sexuality in the American Musical, analyzes Andrews' unique performance style (alongside stars such as Mary Martin and Ethel Merman) and devotes an entire chapter to The Sound of Music, studying it within a queer feminist context, and shedding light on its importance among lesbian spectators.

Chart Sources:

* Edwards, Julie Andrews (Author) and Johanna Westerman (Illustrator). Mandy. HarperTrophy 1989. ISBN 0064402967. * Edwards, Julie. [[The Last of the Really Great Whangdoodles]]. New York: Harper and Row. 1974. ISBN 000184461X. * Edwards, Julie Andrews. Little Bo: The Story of Bonnie Boadicea. Hyperion, 1999. ISBN 0-7868-0514-5. (several others in this series.) * Edwards, Julie Andrews. Dumpy the Dumptruck. Hyperion, 2000. ISBN 0-7868-0609-5. (several others in the Dumpy series.) * Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton, (Authors). Gennady Spirin (Illustrator). Simeon's Gift. 2003. ISBN 0-06-008914-8. * Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Dragon: Hound of Honor. HarperTrophy, 2005. ISBN 0-06-057121-7. * Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton (Authors) and Tony Walton (Illustrator). The Great American Mousical. HarperTrophy, 2006. ISBN 0-06-057918-8. * Edwards, Julie Andrews and Emma Walton Hamilton. Thanks to You: Wisdom from Mother and Child. Julie Andrews Collection, 2007. ISBN 0061240028.

* Julie Andrews Collection an imprint of HarperCollins * Julie Andrews Online Fan site + forum * Julie Andrews Forum * * *

* Julie Andrews biography at BFI Screenonline * Julie Andrews: Prim and Proper *How Do You Solve A 'Problem' Like Maria von Poppins? (favorable assessment of Julie Andrews' screen image in paper published in Musicals-- Hollywood and Beyond) * Discography at SonyBMG Masterworks * The American Musical, Stars Over Broadway - Julie Andrews (PBS) * "The Now and Future Queen", Time Magazine, 23 December 1966