Julie Andrews: You’ll Never Guess How ‘The Sound of Music’ Literally Laid the Actress Low
Actress Julie Andrews’ new memoir, Home Work opens up about quite a few surprising events in her life. She talks about a cocaine party she and her husband, Blake Edwards, unsuspectingly walked into. She talks about what a lovely person Walt Disney was to her. And she shares at length about her experiences filming The Sound of Music.
Find out how the beloved classic 1965 film bowled her over time and again.
Julie Andrews’ new memoir
This memoir by the 84-year-old and her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, is a follow-up to Andrews’ first memoir from 2008, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years. As the subtitle suggests, Andrews takes readers through her years in Hollywood from 1964’s Mary Poppins to 1982’s Victor/Victoria.
O Magazine said, “The book is packed with emotion, action, gossip, and fascinating tidbits about craft. The Julie Andrews we get to know is salty, funny, passionate, hard-working, gracious, and above all, a brilliant vocalist and actress who has braved many disappointments.”
Andrews on therapy and how it ‘saved my life’
The actress described the period following her 1960s divorce from her husband, Tony Walton, as one of being stuck and of confusion. Her friends thankfully suggested the Tony Award-winning actress try therapy.
It turned out, talk therapy was exactly what she needed, allowing her to sort through her thoughts and to pursue her career and life goals, saving her life, according to the actress.
Therapy, at the time that Andrews sought it, was frowned upon. As she said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she’s gratified that there has been a reversal of how therapy is now viewed.
“I think everybody knows the great work it can do,” said Andrews. “And anybody that is lucky enough to have it, afford it and take advantage of it, I think it would be wonderful.”
How ‘The Sound of Music’ brought the actress literally to her knees
The actress opens up in her new memoir about the opening scene from The Sound of Music. For fans of the movie, it’s an absolutely exhilarating scene, watching Julie Andrews as Maria dancing and frolicking in the fields of Austria. For the actress, not so much.
As she told The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in 2017 and relayed as well in her memoir, “We had this monstrous helicopter that had a cameraman very bravely strapped to the side where the door would be.”
“He had a camera strapped to him, he was strapped into the copter, and he was over like this [shooting downwards]. And it started at one end of the field and I had started at the other and we walked together, and honestly, this thing came at me sideways sort of like this giant sort of crab coming at me or a grasshopper or something, and then I’d come into view.”
Every time, the helicopter would finish its take and rise up again to its first position, the downdraft would throw Andrews to the ground.
“I’d haul myself up, spitting mud and grass and brushing it off my dress, and trek back to my starting position,” she writes in Home Work. “Each time the helicopter encircled me, I was flattened again.”
Who knew Fraulein Maria went through so much?
