Julie Andrews is best known for her clean-cut musical roles, but behind her impeccable manner lies a formidable will. She talks to Emma Brockes about her family life, being on Broadway at the age of 19 - and the importance of being true to her vowels.
Affection for Julie Andrews has grown in the 40-odd years since The Sound of Music, to the extent that she is one of the few British performers to rival the status of America's biggest stars. With impeccable manners, she attributes this to luck and to the fact that because she is lodged in people's childhood memories, she is almost impossible to eradicate. It has also to do with a kind of sincerity - some stars survive by changing with the times; she has thrived by resisting them.
Her most recent film, The Princess Diaries 2, attempts to bring her into line with more modern entertainment values. It is the sequel to the 2001 hit based on Meg Cabot's fairy-tale about an American teenager who inherits the crown to "Genovia", a European state of which Julie is the head.
"You know what, it's got some nice subtle messages," she says crisply. "A lot of films seem to go to the lowest common denominator. This one is talking about responsibility and growing up and assuming your destiny and your life and all of that. It's not a bad message - and being decent; being decent to people."
She is 69, but could be 20 years younger. It is her voice that has defined her. It never came easily. She always had to warm it up and was envious of those who could burst effortlessly into song.
"As my mother said, I never sprang out of bed with a glad shout! My voice needed oiling and then it took off."
Since a disastrous throat operation eight years ago, Julie has been unable to sing. But she speaks with the same precise delivery she brought to her songs. Her words are like beads of mercury: they don't run together. When she refers to Tony Walton, for example, her first husband and the father of her grown-up daughter, Emma, she pronounces "ex-spouse" with a pause in the middle to distinguish the two "s" sounds. Since she comes from Walton-on-Thames, it is always assumed that she has had elocution. But Julie Andrews's diction is the result of her singing lessons.
"I had a teacher who stressed for me the importance of diction in terms of... in terms of supporting one's voice when one is singing. In other words, if you hold on to your words, your voice will pull through for your when you're singing. So be true to your vowels."
She gives an example:
"Supposing you have to sing [from the Messiah]Behold thy king cometh unto thee. If you do a strong 'thee', it will help you with the '-hold', which is a much higher note. It's the note before the note that matters, then you unpeel a song backwards." She puts equal emphasis on a song's lyrics as on the melody and it limited what numbers she could sing.
"I tried singing a lovely song called Feelings." She croaks a few bars. "It has a lot of Oh-oh-ohs in it, and i just completely escaped me. i couldn't get my head around the message of the song. It didn't work after all."
It was her stepfather, Ted Andrews, who got her into singing, one of the few things she has to be grateful to him for.
When her mother remarried, she was forced for reasons of respectability to change her name to Andrews. Her real name is Julia Wells. She used to imagine as a child that, if she grew up to be a novelist, she would combine her middle name with her surname to sign herself Elizabeth Wells. Was her real father annoyed about the name change?
"I suspect he was. He was such a honeybun. He was a really decent, honest... nature-loving man. He gave me the grounding. My mother gave me all the sort of chari-" She stops short of saying "charisma", as if curbing an unseemly spurt of ego. "Flair of whatever," she mutters, "and I don't hold a candle to her, she was wonderful. But my dad was the sane one, really. He treated the kids as beloved equals. He was a teacher and a good one."
Ted Andrews, by contrast, was a song-and-dance man and an alcoholic. The family was dysfunctional, she says, and in her 20s she had a lot of therapy to remedy the fallout from it.
"They gave me as normal a childhood as possible but I didn't know what normal was in those days. I was working from a very early age. So I probably missed out on some of those things... God knows, every family has its problems."
I ask if her stepdad was violent. "There were times when he was." There is a long pause. She sighs. "He was kind of a very sad man. I have to say I have great compassion for him, because he had a tough life himself, although at the time it didn't make much difference to me. You can imagine, I had this lovely dad, I didn't like my stepdad. I wasn't going to accept him and I mean, he tried. But his demons got in the way."
It was an upbringing that made her, if not intolerant of alcohol, then at least very aware of it, something which helped her to withstand the pressures of achieving stardom early on.
When Julie was 19, she won the lead role of Polly in a Broadway production of The Boyfriend and flew, unchaperoned, to New York. Emotionally, she says, she was much younger than her years. The contrast of Manhatten with Walton-on-Thames might easily have derailed her. But Julie knuckled down and, true to the image that would later define her, got on with it.
"The work was hard, I was learning my craft and floundering to stay... Let's see if I can put it correctly and succinctly," she says, sounding suddenly very Poppins-ish. "A lot of my life happened in great, wonderful bursts of good fortune, and then I would race to be worthy of it."
There must, surely, have been temptations along the way?
"Well," she says, "I can't drink too much without getting absolutely silly. Drugs have, mercifully, never worked, so I think I'm far more frightened of being out of control."
What drugs did she try?
"I didn't! Really, I didn't! I don't know why." She giggles.
After The Boyfriend, she had another successful run in the stage production of My Fair Lady, but it was Mary Poppins, for which she won an Oscar, that made her name. A year later, in 1965, she starred in The Sound of Music and her fortune was sealed. Since then, of course, the film has had a life of its own.
As well as Emma, Julie has two daughters with her second husband, Blake Edwards, director of the Pink Panther films. The couple adopted Amy and Joanna from Vietnam; they are now 29 and 30.
"We didn't even think about what we were laying on them at the time," she says. "We only knew what we hoped to do for them. Anyway, they survived. But they are ready [to visit the Far East] now and they want to do it and I've said that we'll go."
Julie Andrews's singing career is over, but the success of The Princess Diaries has revived her acting career and she has other projects on the boil. With her daughter, Emma, she has written several books for children which are published as the Julie Andrews Collection, an imprint of HarperCollins. The collection will be available here in Britain for the first time next year. She is busy with her seven grandchildren, who live, for the most part, near her home in Los Angeles.
Two questions remain unanswered. One: was Christopher Plummer, as is widely assumed, playing Captain von Trapp for laughs?
"I don't think so. We see quite a bit of each other, and - " she whispers, "I think he's quite pleased that he did the film." (He made a terrible fuss about it at the time.)
Dick van Dyke: did she notice during filming how terrible his accent was?
"Uhm. Yeah, and he did, too. He's darling about it. ABsolutely sweet, and he says, 'Ugh, I'm so terrible, but I tried.' It is what it is and one wouldn't change it for anything. Fond memories."
Does she think Mary Poppins and Bert ever got it together? Julie laughs.
"I hope so. She wouldn't admitt it, but I do hope so."
© The Guardian