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Julie Andrews accepting her AFI Tribute Award in 2021.
Here, at The Film Experience, we keep to a 10|25|50|75|100 model when it comes to birthdays and anniversaries. Yet, as the world of entertainment lost so many bright lights in the past few days – Maggie Smith, Kris Kristofferson, Gavin Creel, Ken Page, John Amos, and Karen Gorman – it feels right to take a moment and show some love to those who are still with us. Case in point is the jubilant Julie Andrews, who celebrates her 89th birthday today. This living legend of stage and screen is beyond compare, with a career that spans across eight decades, from entertaining the troops with her parents in the mid-40s to recent voice-over work in such projects as Aquaman and the Bridgerton franchise, for which Andrews has received three Emmy nominations.
All that said, the actress will always have a special place in my heart for reasons that go beyond her body of work. Allow me to share a personal musing…
There was a time when I felt alone in my love for cinema. While I lurked around online communities like this very site, real-life cinephile friends were hard to come by. That may be more understandable when you consider I was around twelve, and not many peers prized the Gosford Park DVD as a Holy Grail of wit and murderous delight. But then, it happened. I switched classes in the seventh grade and met a girl who was to become my best friend. The origin of our bond? I once heard her wax rhapsodic about musicals and had to join the fun, even if no one else was interested. Through her, I discovered much classic cinema, I discovered myself, and found an undying love for her favorite actress in the whole world – Julie Andrews.
We'd exchange DVDs weekly, and you can be assured that many Andrews' vehicles were included in that lot. The actress' miraculous work in The Sound of Music, which I had only seen at holiday TV airings, became a staple and a lesson, a way to appreciate how an effortless, featherlight performance could be built on immense craft. The plentiful extras and commentary tracks helped with that. Then there was Star!, bloated yet beautiful, a Gertrude Lawrence biopic that broke the record for most costume changes in 1968 Hollywood. To this day, I'm unsure if my affection for that title has more to do with Andrews' drunk acting, Donald Brooks' decade-spanning designs, or how I always associate it with a dear friend who made those difficult teenage years bearable.
The Princess Diaries and its sequel were a late-career highlight, not especially challenging but a sweet treat nevertheless. Victor/Victoria came with a whole story about a declined Tony nomination and my first taste of Blake Edwards' funny business. It was also exhilarating for a young queer kid still figuring himself out. Ten was confusing at that age, but amusing, and Andrews an acerbic pleasure. Thoroughly Modern Millie hit me with another bout of costuming euphoria, and Darling Lily offered a cheekier vision of Andrews as a good girl gone bad. Her striptease in that flick is a career highlight, for damn sure. We don't talk about Hawaii, but you better believe the star's shows with Carol Burnett were a topic of enthusiastic conversation.
Weirdly enough, a point of contention was always Julie Andrews' Best Actress Oscar win. While I count it among the greatest of that category's victors, my friend has always remained unimpressed. Mary Poppins isn't so much a person as a fanciful idea, a conflagration of impossibilities wrapped in a nanny package with Edwardian finery on top. Just imagining the tonal balancing that such an act requires makes me dizzy, and the few stabs at humanity are so precise that they feel like surgical stabs in the middle of the Disney musical. Oh well, we've never agreed on Andrews' merits as Mary and I think we never will, but that's part of the fun of having a fellow cinephile as a friend. All this is my way of saying thank you for the friendship, Catarina. And thank you for the movies, Dame Julie, for all the songs and dance and pitch-perfect performances.
What about you, dear reader? What does Julie Andrews mean to you? Do you have similar stories about a cinephile friend from your youth?