Julie Andrews

Julie Andrews is a British-American actress, singer, and author whose seven-decade career has produced two 1960s family-musical lead roles — Mary Poppins in the 1964 Disney film Mary Poppins and Maria in the 1965 Robert Wise film The Sound of Music — that have made her one of the figures of mid-20th-century American and British family-entertainment. She was born Julia Elizabeth Wells on October 1, 1935, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England, into a vaudeville family — her stepfather Ted Andrews and her mother Barbara Ward were touring British vaudeville performers. She started training in classical voice at age eight and made her professional London Palladium debut at age 12.

Her Broadway breakthrough came in 1956 as Eliza Doolittle in the Lerner-and-Loewe musical My Fair Lady — a role she played for 1,672 Broadway performances across two and a half years. The 1960 follow-up Broadway role of Queen Guinevere in Camelot opposite Richard Burton consolidated her position as one of the most-iconic Broadway musical-theater leading actresses of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Her film breakthrough came in 1964 with the Disney musical Mary Poppins — for which she won the Best Actress Academy Award at the 1965 ceremony. The 1965 follow-up The Sound of Music — directed by Robert Wise and based on the 1959 Rodgers-and-Hammerstein Broadway musical — became one of the highest-grossing films of the 1960s and earned her a second consecutive Best Actress Oscar nomination.

The 1997 throat surgery that damaged her singing voice (a subsequent malpractice lawsuit was settled in 2000) effectively ended her singing career. She has continued to act in non-singing roles into her eighties, including the 2001 The Princess Diaries and its 2004 sequel, the 2010 voice role of Karathen the leviathan in Aquaman (2018), and the Netflix series Bridgerton (2020–present, voicing the society columnist Lady Whistledown). She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 2000.

Her name Julie is the French and English short form of Julia (from the Latin Iulia). Julie has been continuously among the most-popular American girls' names for decades.