Julie Andrews

Born Julia Elizabeth Wells in England in 1935, it was discovered when she was a child that she had a freakish but undeniably lovely four-octave singing voice. her mother and stepfather, both vaudeville performers, immediately got her into a singing career, and she performed in music halls throughout her childhood and teens, always immensely popular. At age 20, she performed in a London Palladium production of "Cinderella;" this launched her stage career. She came to Broadway in 1954 with "The Boy Friend." It was a hit, and Julie Andrews became a bona fide star two years later, in 1956, in the role of Eliza Doolittle in the unprecedented hit "My Fair Lady." Her star status continued in 1957, when she starred in the hit TV-production of Cinderella (1957) (TV) and through 1960, when she played Guenevere in "Camelot." She also starred in many TV-specials, notably one with Carol Burnett. In 1963, Walt Disney asked if she would like to star in his upcoming production, a lavish musical fantasy that combined live-action and animation. Julie said she would do it if she did not get to play Eliza in the pending film production of "My Fair Lady." She didn't, and so she made an auspicious film debut in Disney's Mary Poppins (1964), a huge hit which got her the Academy Award for Best Actress. (Audrey Hepburn, who played Eliza in the My Fair Lady film, wasn't even nominated.) Now Julie was a MOVIE STAR in capital letters, and it was her star power that helped make her third film, The Sound of Music (1965), the highest-grossing movie of its day and one of the highest-grossing of all time. The only problem was that now audiences identified her only with singing, sugary-sweet nannies and governesses. Therefore, they could not accept her in dramatic roles (The Americanization of Emily (1964), and definitely not in a Hitchcock thriller (Torn Curtain (1966). However, the musicals Julie subsequently made were casualties of the boom in musical film she helped to create. Throughly Modern Millie (1967), Star(1968), and Darling Lilli (1970) all bombed at the box office. However, Julie did not let this keep her down. She did work in nightclubs and hosted a TV variety series in the 1970s. Then she made a comeback to movies with an appearence in 10 (1979), directed by husband Blake Edwards. He helped continue to keep her on the rise by directing her in subsequent roles that were entirely different than anything she had been seen in before.