Julie Andrews made cinema history as Mary Poppins in Disney's film and as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music. Born in England, she holds the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire and has received an Academy Award, multiple Golden Globes, Emmys and Grammys. Her relationship with fellow screen legend Audrey Hepburn forms the starting point of this conversation.
— Audrey Hepburn was your rival. The studio chose Audrey for the role of Eliza Doolittle, even though it was through your performance that the character, and the musical My Fair Lady itself, acquired classic status.
— I played Eliza in the theater. Film is an entirely different matter. However successful a stage production may be, that does not mean its transfer to the screen will be equally successful. I had no film experience then. Audrey did. She was a movie star. I was a theater star. So Jack Warner preferred Audrey.
— He later justified his decision on “financial grounds”: Hepburn's name guaranteed strong box-office receipts, whereas you were a newcomer in Hollywood. Nevertheless, you regarded his decision as a tremendous injustice?
— As life demonstrates, at least life in the arts, financial considerations are wrong in most cases. Film is, above all, creativity, talent, inspiration. Financial considerations turn art into a business and mass-produced merchandise. Studios are run by businessmen. They are usually good at mathematics and much worse at artistic intuition. That is why they make mistakes. Choosing the right actor for a role is very simple if the choice is made with the heart. Jack Warner and people like him never had a heart.
— But you have been associated with Disney throughout your life. You served as an official ambassador for Disneyland's fiftieth-anniversary celebrations around the world. That studio does not always behave impeccably either, yet you continue working with it. Do you feel part of the corporation?
— I do not equate the great Walt Disney with today's studio. Walt was a wonderful man, highly creative and sensitive. He behaved differently from his Hollywood colleagues. He offered me the role of Mary Poppins, knowing perfectly well about the situation with Jack Warner. I refused. I was pregnant and preparing to return to London. I had no desire to give birth in New York. But Disney said, “All right, I'll wait. Have your baby and come back.” He knew in his heart that I was right for the part. So he had no doubts. Of course he enjoyed the situation around the Oscars when both films came out around the same time and Audrey and I found ourselves in the awards conversation.
— But the Oscar went to you. In your acceptance speech you even thanked Jack Warner: if he had not refused you the role of Eliza Doolittle, you would never have played Mary Poppins.
— Sometimes the people who want to do you harm end up doing you good.
— How did Audrey react to your victory?
— In Hollywood it is not customary to criticize colleagues. She congratulated me. And I would have done the same in her place. Audrey was a marvelous actress and a wonderful person. But she was not a singer. By casting her in the leading role of a musical, Jack Warner behaved unprofessionally. He let her down, and himself as well. [Editor's historical note: Marni Nixon dubbed most of Hepburn's singing in the 1964 film My Fair Lady.]
— Another curious intersection of your destiny with Audrey Hepburn's: you married Blake Edwards, who directed Breakfast at Tiffany's. Could one say that your future husband gave your future rival her entrée into Hollywood?
— Hollywood at the time was a tiny village in which everybody knew everybody and everybody worked with everybody. I see no “intersection of destinies” here. All our destinies were intertwined.
— Since we are speaking about film as a business, you starred in Darling Lili, directed by your husband Blake Edwards, and the film failed at the box office. By then you already had an Oscar, and Blake was among the industry's most respected directors.
— Yes, you put it correctly: “as a business.” Paramount handled the film's distribution. And precisely at the moment when financial considerations were needed, the people in charge seemed to have none. They could not organize the film's distribution properly even in America, let alone worldwide. From an artistic point of view it was a beautiful film. And what a magnificent song!
— Another injustice: Henry Mancini won an Oscar for that song, which you performed, but you were not even mentioned. It seems someone in that little village called Hollywood was against you—and that someone was a very powerful beast. Do you know who?
— Of course I know. But all those people are gone now. So let us not speak about them.
— But the whole situation seriously harmed your career. You went straight home to England and stayed away for quite some time.
— They did not succeed in harming my career. On the contrary, all that persecution brought Blake and me closer together. And I did not simply leave: I left with Blake. He was my greatest prize from Hollywood. Everything else meant nothing to me. [She pauses.] But Blake became severely depressed. He was devastated by the betrayal of his colleagues. [She struggles to hold back tears and falls silent for a while.]
— You were happy together, weren't you? Forty years together, wonderful children, working side by side…
— We were very happy, that is true. But after the Darling Lili episode we stopped working together. When we left Hollywood, Blake decided to continue The Pink Panther. It was his creation, after all. There were no suitable parts in it for me. And my period with The Sound of Music was beginning, with the film and the subsequent concert tours in America. His Panther was enormously popular in Europe. The English, French, Germans and Italians went quite mad for it. Blake had not expected the later films to become more and more successful, especially The Return of the Pink Panther. They were so successful that Hollywood finally began bitterly regretting how it had treated him. They invited him back. He was a true Angeleno, born and bred, and life in Europe was hard for him. He missed home terribly during the years we spent there. For his sake I decided to come back to America. He died here in Los Angeles and is buried here, too. So I will spend the rest of my life here, near his grave.
— In your memoirs you describe your childhood in England as the darkest period of your life: poverty, an alcoholic stepfather. You wrote that as a child you feared abuse from him?
— I do not want to recall it. My mother and stepfather were actors and musicians who performed for our soldiers. They did not stand in the way of my career. They helped me begin singing lessons, and I took my first steps onstage with them. My stepfather and I sang while my mother accompanied us on the piano. I remember being stood on a beer barrel. I am grateful to them for all that.
— People expected you to become an opera singer, didn't they? Your professional debut featured an aria from the opera Mignon.
— Oh yes! Everyone said I had a rare soprano with a range of four octaves and that I was born for the opera stage. But, to my shame, I never loved opera. I am generally a positive person and prefer music that is cheerful, sunny, and invariably in a major key. Opera is serious business and, as a rule, in a minor key. But the sound of a symphony orchestra is the most beautiful music there is. That is why I always gave my concerts with a symphony orchestra.
— You and your husband came back to America in triumph: he with The Pink Panther and you with The Sound of Music, for which you received another Golden Globe and an Oscar nomination. Readers in Germany and Austria will be particularly interested in your memories of filming The Sound of Music in the Austrian and Bavarian Alps.
— I doubt I can tell you anything especially interesting about the filming. We spent three months in Austria, in Salzburg and its surroundings, including Bavaria. It rained all the time. Even for an Englishwoman accustomed to wet weather it was hard. Dresses and shoes became soaked, but the director kept filming. The rest of the film was shot on soundstages in Hollywood. So my Alpine experience, frankly, was not extensive.
— You experienced the war in England, including the Blitz in 1941?
— Yes. Unfortunately, I have never been able to forget the atrocities of the Nazis. I still perform English patriotic antiwar songs from those years in my concerts.
— And yet at first you refused to participate in the film about a family resisting the Nazis?
— I did not refuse because of the subject. I simply did not much like the stage musical. It was playing on Broadway when I was working there, singing in Cinderella, also by Rodgers and Hammerstein. The Broadway Sound of Music struck me as a syrupy tale that did not fit the seriousness of the subject. An Austrian family rejects the Nazi regime and decides to flee, risking the lives of small children. Where is the romance in that? When choosing an actress for Maria, the producer and director watched me in Mary Poppins. They specifically asked Disney to show them footage before the film reached cinemas. They understood that if I took the part, I would do my own singing. Therefore the songs had to suit me. Once I heard the songs, everything fell into place, and I happily agreed.
— Did you know that Germany already had films about the von Trapp family, Die Trapp-Familie (1956) and its sequel Die Trapp-Familie in Amerika (1958)? German-speaking audiences often preferred their own versions to the American film, released there under the title Meine Lieder – meine Träume, “My Songs – My Dreams.” There were even controversies about editing the film's treatment of Salzburg after the Anschluss.
— My Songs – My Dreams? But that is a wonderful title! My songs really are my dreams. [She laughs.]
— The real Maria von Trapp sold rights to German producers for 9,000 deutsche marks, and those producers subsequently resold the story to American studios, eventually earning enormous sums. People still disagree about whether the family was exploited. What is your opinion?
— Here we are again with financial considerations in filmmaking! In this instance I am inclined to side with the studios. When they began working on the project, they could not know that it would be so successful. Perhaps 9,000 marks was a large sum at the time. A million dollars would likewise have been enormous money for the Americans, practically half a film's budget. They took a risk, paid the money, and won. But the project could also have lost money, and not through their fault. Unfortunately, that happens. So I think it was fair.
— The Sound of Music is included in the US Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Its soundtrack was enormously successful, and you sang most of the songs. In 2015 Lady Gaga performed a tribute at the Oscars. Audiences at sing-along screenings still sing along with your numbers, and you later received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet after 1965 and until The Princess Diaries you appeared in relatively few films. Why?
— My dear, did you not hear what I just said? My songs are my dreams. I am a musician and a singer first and foremost. And when I saw that the entire world adored my songs, I simply began giving solo concerts. I was offered many film roles, but I turned them down. Believe me, nobody onstage during those years was happier than I was!
— You performed an enormous number of concerts, mostly solo. Nobody came out to replace you for even a few minutes so you could rest. And as I understand it, the concerts were accompanied by full symphony orchestras. That must place extraordinary demands on a voice?
— I love standing onstage singing, supported by an orchestra behind me, so much that I did not want to share that happiness with anybody. Working with an orchestra feels like floating on its mighty waves of sound. Nothing compares with that pleasure. Besides, it is very expensive. What sensible singer would share something so dearly bought with somebody else? No, no! That is my stage, my leading role!
— Until the unfortunate operation on your vocal cords at a New York hospital. You accused the surgeons of wrongdoing and sued them. How did the proceedings unfold? Were you in court? And why were two surgeons involved—Scott Kessler and Jeffrey Libin? Did that not strike you as odd from the beginning?
— Oh, how naïve we all are! Why two surgeons? Because that means two fees! There was no actual court hearing. But there was years of correspondence between my attorneys and the doctors' lawyers. Eventually I realized the lawyers enjoyed all this activity, because their fees depended on how many letters they wrote. Just as surgeons' fees depended on how many operations they performed. It seemed I was feeding one group of rogues to catch another group of rogues red-handed. It began to anger me. Meanwhile my anger toward the surgeons gradually diminished. Deep down, I felt I had forgiven them. So when I was offered a settlement outside court, I accepted it gladly. You see, nobody could give me my voice back anyway. The damage had been done. What good would a lawsuit do? Revenge?
— But afterward, in an attempt to restore your voice, you underwent surgery four more times, and it did not help?
— I was desperate. I was ready to kill myself. That is why I agreed to further operations. It took me a very long time to understand that these surgeons were simply profiting from me. In fact, I had not been ill in the first place. I had only overworked my vocal cords.
— But you still perform concerts!
— I did not sing for twenty years, and I was terribly unhappy. In 2010 I was persuaded to appear with the Royal Philharmonic in London. I went onstage, sang as best I could, and realized that, because I was an actress, I could “act” a song. I do not so much sing as tell a story with music. Since then I have been on the road again, though now I give no more than one concert a month. Always with a symphony orchestra. And that is quite enough to make me happy.
— You are the author of thirty books, mainly stories and fairy tales for children written with your eldest daughter Emma. And you are also the author of a memoir.
— Memoirs. Plural.
— Have you ever thought about making a documentary about your life?
— Hardly. I am so involved in the children's projects Emma and I are working on that I cannot devote my energy to anything else.
— Your Greenroom project premiered on Netflix on March 17, 2017. One season with 13 episodes. Are you going to continue this project?
— Probably not. I focus on my books and voice work.