As Stephen Colbert puts it right at the top of his interview with the legendary Dame Julie Andrews on
The Late Show, somewhere in our youth or childhood we must have done something good to deserve her. Every day’s a holiday with Julie. She’s like raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens. A spoonful of Julie helps the interview go down!Her iconic Broadway and movie career has included such family favourites as
The Sound of Music (obvi),
Mary Poppins, and
My Fair Lady, most of which she has written about in her memoir
Home Work which is now available in paperback. So of course Stephen had to ask about an anecdote she shared in the book about her struggle to utter this one line in
Mary Poppins. And as it turns out, it was actually the very first line she ever spoke on film.
“It was so simple that I couldn’t think how to do it!” she said via video-chat from her home office (Yes Fraulein Maria is Zoom-savvy!). “And Dick van Dyke, my partner on that particular shot, said something like, ‘You look very pretty today Mary Poppins.’ And all I had to do was walk past him and say, ‘Do you really think so?’ And I thought to myself, ‘How? Open your mouth, Julie! Just say it!’”Luckily, Stephen had a clip of that moment handy, so we could see just how she nailed it. We can say without hyperbole that her performance in that moment was supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Real talk.She and Stephen also commiserated about their confusion when they switched from stage acting to film acting. As Julie started off in London’s West End and then moved to Broadway before switching to movies, Stephen started off doing live theatre and live improv shows at Chicago’s Second City, before making the switch, which he found jarring. Dame Julie had some wise perspectives about how to approach the switch in craft.