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.[video_embed id='1570672']RELATED: Emily Blunt nails her performance in 'Mary Poppins Returns' [/video_embed]“I think the pleasant thing about filmmaking is that it’s shot in very tiny segments. You don’t start at the beginning and go right through to the end as you would obviously in a show. . . On stage, you are all the time in full figure, but of course in film it could be a waist shot, a close up, on a giant cinemascope!” Ah yes, that sweeping opening cinemascope shot of Julie atop the Austrian mountains in
The Sound of Music comes to mind.She’s clearly a master of rolling with the punches and switching things up, because as she showed Stephen, she’s started working from home with her own podcast for children called
Julie’s Library in collaboration with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton. She even turned a closet into a soundproof recording booth with the help of blankets, pillows, and towels. “It’s quite hot in there!” she laughed.When it comes to technology, if a British Dame born in 1935 can master Zoom and also create her own podcast, there’s clearly no excuse for the rest of us.[video_embed id='-1']BEFORE YOU GO: Dog isn't happy when asked to social distance from best friend [/video_embed]
