THE CELEBRATED ACTOR HAD A TURBULENT UPBRINGING BEFORE BECOMING WORLD-FAMOUS FOR PLAYING TWO PERFECT NANNIES. NOW SHE’S BONDING WITH A NEW GENERATION OF CHILDREN THROUGH HER STORYTELLING PODCAST
“I’ll tell you what, shall I go outside?” Julie Andrews asks. We are talking by phone, but, alas, the reception inside her home on Long Island is, she says, “always terrible”. Torturous minutes pass in which I can hear only fragments of her conversation, and if anyone knows of a sweeter agony than being barely able to hear Andrews’s still lovely, melodious voice, I don’t want to know what it is. Eventually, I have to tell her this phone conversation isn’t working.
“I can stand out in my garden, although it is a bit nippy…” Andrews suggests.
Please do not go outside, I nearly shout down the line, suddenly envisioning Andrews developing pneumonia because of me.
“Honestly, it is no trouble at all! Oh dear, now my dogs are going crazy…”
Julie Andrews has described being offered cocaine at a party in 1971. ‘The hosts began pushing me hard, curious to see how Mary Poppins would react,’ she wrote. ‘Oh yes, I was terrified!’ she says, laughing, when I mention the incident.
Andrews and I are talking today because she and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, have launched a podcast, soothingly titled Julie’s Library, in which the two women read children’s stories. The podcast had been scheduled to launch later this year, but they decided to bring it forward when most of the world was suddenly locked inside their homes. It’s fair to say the world was grateful. “Oh thank God: Julie Andrews wants to read us some stories” was a typical headline in response to the news.
Few people are more associated with feelings of comfort and safety than Andrews. “Nothing can be wrong in the world if Andrews is looking after us,” the US journalist Diane Sawyer said while interviewing Andrews last year. Much of this, of course, is to do with her two most famous roles, the perfect nannies Mary/Maria in Mary Poppins, from 1964, and The Sound of Music, from 1965. The movies are more than half a century old, but Andrews has long since accepted that she will never escape their double-headed shadow and has gracefully answered questions about them ever since from besotted members of the public and journalists.