Editorial Review
Julie Andrews is the last of the great Hollywood musical stars, unequaled by any in her time.
In My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews had the biggest hit on Broadway. As the title character in Mary Poppins, she won an Academy Award. And, in 1965, The Sound of Music made her the most famous woman in the world and rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, the disastrous Star! almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen.
Her film career seemed over.
Yet Julie Andrews survived, with what Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady, called “that terrible British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.” Victor/Victoria, directed by her second husband, Blake Edwards, reinvented her screen image---but its stage version in 1997 led to the devastating loss of her defining talent, her singing voice.
Against all odds, she has fought back again, with leading roles in The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2. The real story of bandy-legged little Julia Wells from Walton-on-Thames is even more extraordinary; fresh details of her family background have only recently come to light.
This is the first completely new biography of Julie Andrews as artist, wife, and mother in over thirty-five years---combining the author’s interviews with the star and his wide-ranging and riveting research. It is a frank but affectionate portrait of an enduring icon of stage and screen, who was made a Dame in the Millenium Honours List.
Once dubbed “the last of the really great broads” by Paul Newman, she was the only actress in the 2002 BBC poll The 100 Greatest Britons. But who was Dame Julie, and who is she now?
This is her story.
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Customer Reviews
That extra spoonful of sugar! 
2008-05-26
Of course Julie Andrews has always been my idol. Growing up watching "Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music", "Thoroughly Modern Millie", made me want to be just like her. Beautiful, sweet, and with the vocal ability of an angel! Well, I am none of those things. I have such vivid memories of her singing. I used to sit under a table all day and listen to the record of "The Sound of Music" for hours on end.
I have grown up thinking, Julie Andrews was a Queen among women.
This book made me see inside the "Queen". Whoa! I found out things about her I really didn't want to know. Ah! She is a mere mortal after all. Bummer! I did enjoy this book. Learning her background made me appreciate her even more. Long live the "Queen".
I regret purchasing this book 
2008-05-06
I ordered this book because since the 1960's I've adored Julie Andrews. I found here everything I wanted to know about her. But this book is not very "readable".
Mr Stirling often leads the reader down dead end paths - leaves them wondering "Where am I now?" and is often not fun to read. I enjoy a book that flows. This one jerks along like an old truck with a couple of flat tires on a bumpy forest road. Occasionally there's a well written story, but for the most part it's hard to follow and the stories he tells are truncated and with unrelated elements. It's like being in a forest and wondering where the path is. I'd rather have gotten (and will get) my information from other sources.
This fills in the lbanks where "Home" doesn't 
2008-05-03
I read Julie Andrews' Home first and then picked this up to finish the story. It's well done with loads of details and facts that were previously unknown. Goes so far even to mention Julie's efforts to publish Home in early 2008. This books is worthwhile and quite entertaining. A must read for any Julie Andrews fan.
As pleasant as the image she presents! 2008-04-13
I wanted to know more about Julie Andrews. I adored her as Mary Poppins, loved her in The Sound of Music & was delighted by her comic performance in Thoroughly Modern Millie. I somewhat remember her "falling from grace" so to speak, making some unmemorable films, dissappearing...then suddenly it seems, she's back writing children's books & making successful movies again!
So I really wanted an overview of her entire life and that is why I chose this book by Richard Stirling over HOME which ends about the time that Julie's fame begins.
The book is an engaging, easy read that has generally fulfilled my expectations. It covers Julie's meteoric rise to the heights of fame and the painfully slow slide into a lingering sort of limbo that allowed her to triumphantly hold her head up occassionally but never again made full use of her sunny personality & gorgeous voice.
This book gave me the distinct impression that instead of being "ahead of her time" that unfortunately Julie Andrews showed up perhaps 20 years too late to be fully utilized in the field of musical/comedy films. (...and it teases us with the vehicles proposed for her but never made...) However, it also points to the fact that Julie is full of tenacity & perseverance. Of course, she is still around and that's a good thing.
Free flowing, fresh and finely detailed. 2007-10-25
Unlike his subject, Richard Stirling doesn't go beyond his professional talents and requirements. He writes a good biography where his subject never stopped at simply giving us a good song perfectly delivered.
He keeps his well judged and full bodied biography within the realms of good taste and gives us, without camp or intrusion, a clear picture of the complicated life of one of the Last Great Hollywood Icons. He also gives all the information we need to decide what it was that caused that Icon to rust and fall and then eventually rise again. He takes us with insight and humour beyond the often cited unfashionable image and untimely films that caused Miss Andrews to flounder on the rocks just off the shore of superstardom.
In spite of being perceived as Englishness personified and even being the only actress listed in the results of a recent poll which looked to name the Great Britons, very early on in life she became an American; not a great but a mediocre American.
She is quoted as saying that it was America that made her a star and that the English would have left her to kick in a chorus line. This is improbable given the way her career was going in the UK before being exported to star in the Broadway transfer of The Boy Friend, but it sounds good as a piece of self justification. She went from applying her limited, specialist talent and her strong lovable stage and screen presence in the best situations possible to decades of roles and films that needed a talent entirely different to her own. In other words she stopped doing what she did best very early on in her career. The whys and wherefores of this disastrous mistake are among the core interests in this long needed biography.
Odd though it is that being a first rate live performer should be second choice to appearing in third rate films, Stirling clears up this conundrum as he uncovers the gradual Americanisation (and worse) Hollywoodisation of Julie. Star studded self-named television specials alongside theatre concerts featuring the worlds best orchestras and conductors seemingly underscored decades in a life filled by personal and professional doubt, therapy and unconvincing cinema projects that showed her up as a mediocre acting talent, constantly cost far too many millions and then flopped miserably as the studios, who eventually took their ball home, looked on in horror.
Richard Stirling takes us through this extraordinary life starting with the making of the child variety star with the freak adult vocal chords housed in the tiny sound box making waves that might have drowned a less determined spirit. The now extinct world of music hall is brought vividly to life before moving on to The Hit Broadway Operetta, world recognition, diva sized misjudgements of choice and behaviour, years of confused image and misuse of talent, arriving finally at a return to the musical stage in Sondheim's Putting it Together in which she showed the world exactly the thing for which it had been waiting all those years, i.e. a first rate mature singing actress at the peak of her ability. This fringe success crowning takes her onwards and upwards to royal status a second time thanks to another major misjudgement, this time in a disastrous Broadway `succès de scandale' and then on, ironically, to film stardom a second time around thanks to yet another dose of bad Hollywood which this time became a surprise mega hit franchise.
This is Stirling's first major biography. It follows on from years of cinematic study including conceiving and curating seasons at the National Film Theatre as well as more years of journalistic activity for major publications on both sides of the Atlantic. Between the pages of this biography there is magazine sensation found only in the chapter headings and in the melodrama of the hospital soap-opera operating theatre prologue. His writing is otherwise free flowing, fresh and finely detailed without being pedantic. Every aspect and face(t) of her professional and personal life including the brick wall of privacy surrounding his subject, whom he met and interviewed many times, is thoroughly researched. You'd think that the staroftheworld period in her early years is required knowledge for anyone remotely interested in musical theatre history but there are surprises for all no matter how well informed. That said, where this book scores it's biggest success is in the little known story of her life before stardom and the so easily dismissed but fascinating wilderness years of middle age.
