Product Description
Julie Andrews is the last of the great Hollywood musical stars, unequaled by any in her time. In My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews had the biggest hit on Broadway. As the title character in Mary Poppins, she won an Academy Award. And, in 1965, The Sound of Music made her the most famous woman in the world and rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, the disastrous Star! almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen. Her film career seemed over. Yet Julie Andrews survived, with what Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady, called “that terrible British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.” Victor/Victoria, directed by her second husband, Blake Edwards, reinvented her screen image---but its stage version in 1997 led to the devastating loss of her defining talent, her singing voice. Against all odds, she has fought back again, with leading roles in The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2. The real story of bandy-legged little Julia Wells from Walton-on-Thames is even more extraordinary; fresh details of her family background have only recently come to light. This is the first completely new biography of Julie Andrews as artist, wife, and mother in over thirty-five years---combining the author’s interviews with the star and his wide-ranging and riveting research. It is a frank but affectionate portrait of an enduring icon of stage and screen, who was made a Dame in the Millenium Honours List. Once dubbed “the last of the really great broads” by Paul Newman, she was the only actress in the 2002 BBC poll The 100 Greatest Britons. But who was Dame Julie, and who is she now? This is her story.
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 Julie Andrews/ An Intimate Biography
Good, straightforward biography. Made Ms. Andrews seem down to earth and pictured her as a hardworking and very loving wife and mother. I enjoyed seeing what was behind her dazzling talent.
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 Highly recommended ( evergreenrs )
I really love this book. It is bright, charming and informative, and contains a very good overview of Dame Julie's career. My favourite chapters are those that detail her early years on the music hall stage in England, and also the discourse about her fall from grace in the late 1960s, when she found herself out of tempo with the times after the astonishing success of the previous decade.
The book is specific about dates, names and places, which I like, and has lots of details about the films Julie made or turned down, as well as a reflective look at her long-lasting marriage with Blake Edwards. I found it a thumping good read from beginning to end.
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 Just A Spoonful of Yawn
And I don't know if that's Ms Andrew's personality as portrayed in this book, or if the author was that bad of a writer.
Perhaps its a mixture of the two. Certainly, she doesn't come off well in this autobio. She married blah, treated her children like blah, treated her mother and father, siblings etc...like blah, and what we're left with at the end of the book is blah. The only magic Ms Andrews seems to have had was before the camera, and when she sang.
Anyway, it all added up to ... ta da .... blah.
I don't recommend it.
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as a biography, it's an okay eighth-grade book report
An insightful biography -- uh, no. It's really more like a junior high book report, with any sources and semi-relevations culled from other sources than the author's own work. And I can't recall a straightforward biography where its author interjects himself into the process (e.g., "I" got to meet with Dame Julie here or there [usually with a cattle call of reporters, it seems]). The 80s, 90s, and new millennium years of Andrews get short work here, especially, most likely because there weren't other sources for the author to use. Stirling writes things like "'[fill in quote]' Julie snapped" to attempt to add some drama, but how does he know that Julie, indeed, snapped at someone?
It's a tv entertainment show rehash of Andrews' life, so at least for big fans, it offers some mild enjoyment. Let's hope that Julie herself covers these later years as a sequel to her "HOME" autobiography, as she's a real writer.
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That extra spoonful of sugar!
Of course Julie Andrews has always been my idol. Growing up watching "Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music", "Thoroughly Modern Millie", made me want to be just like her. Beautiful, sweet, and with the vocal ability of an angel! Well, I am none of those things. I have such vivid memories of her singing. I used to sit under a table all day and listen to the record of "The Sound of Music" for hours on end.
I have grown up thinking, Julie Andrews was a Queen among women.
This book made me see inside the "Queen". Whoa! I found out things about her I really didn't want to know. Ah! She is a mere mortal after all. Bummer! I did enjoy this book. Learning her background made me appreciate her even more. Long live the "Queen".
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