Popping in for a life achievement award brings back memories
Print Edition
MARY Poppins, cover your ears. Hollywood legend Julie Andrews shocked the world this week by confessing that she has something of a filthy mouth.
“I do swear a lot,” the veteran actress revealed.
Walt Disney found that out when a flywire broke on the set of “Mary Poppins” sending her crashing to the ground.
“I think I said a few words he had not heard very often,” she added.
Andrews, now 83 but looking and sounding decades younger, insisted that she was “never a goodie two shoes” as she picked up a lifetime achievement award at the Venice film festival.
Although she made her name and won an Oscar playing the prim English governess in the 1964 Disney classic, Andrews said that like her, the character had a hidden and far more mischievous inner life.
“On the outside she is very proper — but look at the lining of her jackets and her skirts — they are very colorful and wicked.”
Andrews’ butter-wouldn’t-melt image was further reinforced when she played Maria von Trapp the following year in “The Sound of Music,” which tells the story of a novice nun who becomes a governess.
But the actress admitted that she had found the story too schmaltzy when she saw the musical version of it on Broadway.
“I thought it was too sentimental and saccharine and over the top. I mean, you have mountains and nuns and seven children, but all together!” she said.
“So I decided with the director Robert Wise that we would try to be as astringent as we possibly could. I think it made a big difference.”
Her abiding memories of the filming are the cold and the rain.
“It was so beautiful there in Salzburg (in Austria) but it rained, rained, rained.”
Andrews, who has started directing in her eighties, also paid tribute to her late husband, the director Blake Edwards.
He wrote both “Victor Victoria” — now regarded as a LGBT classic on a par with “La Cage aux Folles” — and “S.O.B” for her, a film industry satire in which she plays a family-friendly star who ends up in a porn flick.
She said the man behind the “Pink Panther” films and “10” “really knew me, he was so clever.”
Andrews, who was made a dame by Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II at the turn of the century, revealed she has written a memoir with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, which will be published in October.
Yet Andrews said that the upbeat message of her best-known films were very much a reflection of her. “I am very much a glass-half-full person,” she said.
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