The Real Reason You Don't Hear From Julie Andrews Anymore
Julie Andrews performed without a pause all her life. And now, the 88-year-old is taking a hard-earned, well-deserved rest. The Hollywood icon, actor, and singer extraordinaire has "pretty much retired" from her golden run at the movies, she told Forbes. The winding down of her film credits, however, is not indicative of any kind of artistic passivity in Andrews, who has turned her attentions to other outlets. Literature, for one, became a significant part of Andrews' life in the years after certain tragic circumstances drove her away from her day job as a screen and stage performer. It gave her a renewed sense of purpose: "I think I would go completely mad if I didn't have some lovely thing to work on."
After finding early success as a Broadway actor, Andrews came to Hollywood and instantly revitalized it with magic and music. She won an Oscar with her debut in "Mary Poppins," foretelling the superstardom that awaited her. As she broadened her recognition in the competitive film industry, she simultaneously turned several corners in her private life — and balancing everything wasn't always raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. Despite the demands of her progressing age and the sorrows of personal losses, Andrews continued fulfilling her creative destiny as best she could, with a shift to more favorable opportunities in voice acting and children's books. Read on to learn why we don't hear from Julie Andrews anymore and what she has been up to of late.
Throat surgery left Julie Andrews' voice permanently changed
Julie Andrews' four-octave voice, which echoed over the hills of Salzburg and rang through the Banks household, has been synonymous with her name ever since she first performed in England as a trained child singer. That soprano, recognizable anywhere, constituted a major part of not just her fame but also her self. "I would have been quite a sad lady if I hadn't had the voice to hold on to. The singing was the most important thing of all," she told AARP in 2019. In 1997, things had come crashing down when Andrews underwent surgery at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to have a noncancerous nodule removed from her throat. The operation did more than just that; it wreaked havoc on Andrews' singing voice.
"When I woke up from an operation to remove a cyst on my vocal cord, my singing voice was gone. I went into a depression. It felt like I'd lost my identity," she said. Andrews was apparently not informed that the procedure had the potential to leave her voice irreversibly changed. In 1999, she sued the hospital and two surgeons for malpractice, The New York Times reported. The lawsuit, settled for undisclosed terms in 2000, noted that unnecessary operations had been performed on the actor's vocal cords. Though she unsuccessfully attempted to regain her lost soprano, Andrews was not discouraged by the setback and eventually found other ways to put her vocal superpowers to good use.
Balancing a career with a family life wasn't always easy for her
The title of Julie Andrews' 2019 memoir "Home Work" is deeply telling of the dichotomy of her life as a Hollywood star and a committed family woman. "I always hoped the two worlds could coexist; I adored my family and enjoyed my work," she told Business Insider. This balancing act wasn't always easy to pull off for Andrews, who found it to be an "ongoing challenge" that eventually led her to seek therapy. Raising Emma Walton Hamilton (born 1962), was a key part of Andrews' domestic schedule at the height of her stardom, though it wasn't the only one. She was also working at her first marriage with Tony Walton, which ultimately broke down due to her hectic lifestyle as an actor, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Her second marriage to Blake Edwards, though successful and longer-lasting than her first, brought with it a whole new set of trials that included family trauma and substance addictions. She received parenting support from Edwards for their brood of five children while also drawing on her characteristic resilience and compassion to cope. While she confesses to never explicitly having made a choice between her career and family, Andrews does prioritize one over the other. As she told The Telegraph: "My kids and my family, my garden, my home life is the thing that I guard most of all because it is precious to me."
She turned to writing children's books with her daughter
In her over seven-decade-long career, Julie Andrews has formed one half of many a legendary pair on-screen. Her most successful collaboration in recent times, however, has been with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton in the world of literature. Together, the mother-daughter duo has written well over 30 books that cater primarily to children (or just about anyone who's unafraid to give flight to their imagination). As characteristic as it is for Andrews to invoke magical wonder with her work, her decision to turn to children's writing was precipitated by the tragedy of losing her soprano voice in the '90s. "And so, I was bemoaning my fate to Emma, and she said, 'Oh, Mum, you've just found another way of sharing your voice.' And I tell you, it hit me so hard what she said," Andrews told CBS News.
From "Waiting in the Wings" to "The Enchanted Symphony" and "The Great American Mousical," the Andrews-Hamilton partnership has produced many beloved literary gems, some of which were New York Times bestsellers. The team followed a golden formula that has worked in Andrews' favor since her "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music" era. "We don't talk down to kids. We try to bring them up so that you don't condescend in any way," Andrews explained. Besides books, Andrews and Hamilton are also keeping audiences educated and entertained through Netflix puppet musicals like "Julie's Greenroom" and a book reading podcast called "Julie's Library."
Julie Andrews endured several personal losses
Julie Andrews has tasted stratospheric success in her career. But she has also faced her fair share of grief. When Blake Edwards died in 2010, Andrews lost more than just her husband of 41 years. The filmmaking icon behind Hollywood classics like "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and "The Pink Panther" was also one of Andrews' most fruitful collaborators and had made no fewer than seven movies with her, including her career highlights "S.O.B." and "Victor/Victoria."
After an unlikely meet-cute during therapy, the couple married in 1969 and — despite difficult phases brought on by Edwards' often volatile personality and opioid addiction — persevered for decades. "Today when I reflect on him, I still miss him so dreadfully," she told Oprah Daily in 2019. "They broke the mold when Blake was born. I hadn't come across anybody with his wit and sophistication, which I relied on a great deal."
Grief struck again with the death of her longtime friend Christopher Plummer in 2021. Andrews led tributes to the universally beloved Captain von Trapp actor, whose romantic interest she played in "The Sound of Music," giving cinema one of its most iconic on-screen pairings. "The world has lost a consummate actor today and I have lost a cherished friend," she said in a statement (via People). The duo had reunited a year before Plummer's death to celebrate the musical's 50th anniversary, delighting fans with their characteristically lively, ever-goofy friendship of decades.
She looked back at over 80 years of her life through memoirs
Containing the kind of abundant life Julie Andrews has lived within a book could not have been an easy task by any measure. But the veteran actor diligently accomplished this task not once but twice over. In 2008, a largely inactive cinema year for Andrews, her first memoir "Home" was published. The book took a deep, long look at the bulk of Andrews' eventful existence, in particular the difficulties of her poverty-stricken childhood — which included defending herself against her stepfather's sexual advances and financially holding her family together as a teen performer. According to CBS News, writing the autobiography took nearly 10 years after Andrews first signed a contract for it in 1999.
"The later years would be harder to write because there's just so much: the wonder of people I've met, the movies I've made," she said. Undaunted, she undertook that challenge over the next decade and released a follow-up memoir titled "Home Work" in 2019. Co-authored with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton, this one was a look back at Andrews' personal life in context of her Hollywood career and superstardom — and gave Andrews "many a sleepless night," as she told The Telegraph. "Writing a memoir is like living your life all over again — the first time round you're so busy just dealing with what's coming at you." Needless to say, the chronicle was well received and, like "Home," became a New York Times bestseller.
Hollywood didn't always offer Julie Andrews a level playing field
One of the most famous pieces of lore surrounding Julie Andrews' Hollywood success relates to how serendipitously it came about. Having knocked it out of the park as Eliza Doolittle in the original Broadway production of "My Fair Lady," it was all but fitting that Andrews reprised the titular role when the musical was adapted for film in the 1960s. Much to the dismay of Andrews and later, the outrage of audiences, the 1964 role went to Oscar-winning actor Audrey Hepburn. Her Broadway success apparently couldn't compete with Hollywood stardom — which didn't totally surprise Andrews. "I was not a star, I was not box office," she said of the snub on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971. "I'll never forget it, but I understand it."
Things evened out when she landed her debut breakthrough "Mary Poppins," which came out the same year as "My Fair Lady," smashed Disney records, and won Andrews an Oscar. That the film industry didn't always offer the fairest playing field was a realization that probably struck Andrews again when she was the only one nominated for a Tony Award out of the entire team of "Victor/Victoria." Andrews starred in the 1995 musical but turned down the honor, calling attention to her "egregiously overlooked" co-stars who didn't make the cut for nominations (via Playbill). Her bold stand sparked wide controversy at the time and reportedly threatened to mess up the award show's broadcast.
She turned down some interesting opportunities
It's not like Julie Andrews took a step back from the acting world for want of meaty acting roles. Far from it. The acting veteran has no dearth of opportunities that would doubtless add to her already illustrious career. One of these came to her from the uppermost echelons of filmmaking in the form of an offer to join Martin Scorsese's "The Wolf of Wall Street."
Andrews was up for the role of Aunt Emma in the Oscar-winning, drug-fueled, stock market fever dream but — much as the world would have loved to watch the actor behind the eternally guileless characters of Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp go rogue — she turned it down due to her need to recover from an ankle operation. "It was a really a tough choice, but I didn't feel up to it. I was still having a hard time getting about, so very regretfully I had to decline the offer," she told BirminghamLive.
She was also invited to relive her heyday legacy with a part in "Mary Poppins Returns," a modern-day sequel to the 1964 classic. But the ever-dignified Andrews refused, so as to avoid stealing Emily Blunt's thunder as she revived the role of the magical nanny. "She immediately said no," director Rob Marshall told Variety. "She said, 'This is Emily's show and I want her to run with this.'" There is, however, talk of another "Princess Diaries" film to which Andrews hasn't said no.
Julie Andrews switched from film acting to voice acting
Julie Andrews' voice is the foundation on which her glorious career stands. So her step back from screen acting hardly divested her of her performing power, which she continued to make good use of through voice acting. Over the years, Andrews has worked on beloved productions across genres — including the "Shrek" films and the DC feature "Aquaman" — treating a wide and varied audience to the magic of her voice. The Hollywood icon has also maintained a hold on fantasy movies, narrating "Enchanted" and "The King's Daughter."
In recent years, "Bridgerton" has accounted for one of Andrews' most popular voice roles. As Lady Whistledown, the scandalous gossip writer-cum-narrator, Andrews plays the chief mischief maker on the Regency-era Shondaland drama. "I occasionally guide it, twist it, point it in some direction or another. I can make or break anybody, it seems, if I wish," she told Parade. Her participation in the series has been strictly off-camera and will most likely remain so, what with the revelation of Lady Whistledown's true identity.
Though Andrews has been voice acting since she was a teenager, its advantage over film acting is something she is greatly cherishing in her 80s. "It's very pleasant because you don't have to go into the studio," she told Vanity Fair. "You can just come in your dressing gown if you want, but mostly, you don't have to do hair and makeup. You just have to give a voice."