Julie Andrews Turns 91: A Life at Home, from Surrey to Gstaad

Julie Andrews turns 91 today, and the homes she has inhabited — from a servants'-quarters cottage in Surrey to a Swiss chalet and a Malibu bluff — map a career that began on the vaudeville stage and ended, in residential terms at least, in Sag Harbor, New York.

The Oscar-winning star of Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music was performing with her vaudevillian parents throughout her childhood. "I stood on a beer crate in order to reach the microphone," Andrews wrote in her 2019 memoir Home Work. By 20 she was starring as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway; at 30 she had won an Academy Award.

By 11, when one archival photograph was taken, she was already a stage veteran. She sang for King George at London's Stage Door Canteen in 1946. The following spring, her family bought a house in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, with a large garden of lilacs, roses and a grass tennis court. "Originally, it had been servants' quarters to a mansion next door; Mum discovered that her mother had been a below-stairs maid there in her teens and had actually lived in our house at that time," Andrews wrote in Home Work. The catch: "we couldn't afford to maintain it."

At 17, Andrews starred in the London production of The Boy Friend and became the family's main breadwinner. When the show moved to Broadway, she landed in a Times Square hotel. "New York was noisy and hot and I was miserably homesick," she recalled. "My room was a tiny single that looked out over an air shaft." By 1956 she was living at the Hotel Park Chambers at 15 West 58th Street, soon joined by her boyfriend, the set and costume designer Tony Walton.

In 1958, back in London's West End for My Fair Lady, Andrews lived in a Savoy Hotel suite overlooking the Thames and Waterloo Bridge. On opening night that April she hosted a post-performance dinner for family and friends — including Maggie Smith and Claire Bloom — while waiting for the morning reviews.

She married Walton on May 10, 1959, and the couple settled in "a small flat in Eaton Square" in Belgravia, where Walton commandeered the second bedroom to design a new musical called Valmouth. Eight performances a week took their toll; Andrews, having thrown out her back, asked to be released from her contract two months early.

In 1960 the couple returned to New York for Camelot, taking an apartment at River House, 1175 York Avenue, with a roommate: a poodle named Shy, brought from London. Andrews brought Shy to the theater, she told Vogue, because "my husband and I lived in a small apartment and we didn't want her to ever be lonely." Shy howled along during vocal exercises. "I'd see her little snout come under the door, and she'd still be trying to sing along with me. It was very, very sweet," Andrews told Broadway Direct. Decades later, Shy became the subject of a children's book, co-written with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton.

A 1961 photograph of Andrews looking out over Manhattan captures a turning point. Walt Disney, having seen her in Camelot, offered her the title role in Mary Poppins — a part she could take only because producers had passed her over for the film version of My Fair Lady, giving the role to Audrey Hepburn. "Our daughter, Emma, was born in London on November 27, 1962," Andrews writes. "Three months later, Tony, Emma, her nanny, and I boarded a plane for Hollywood, and thus began a brand-new chapter in our lives."

Disney Studios housed the family in a rented Tudor in Toluca Lake, "charmingly furnished in the English style, most of it pulled from the Studios' furniture and prop storage." By 1965 they had moved to "a small, Spanish-style rental house on Bowmont Drive" off Coldwater Canyon, while also acquiring an apartment in Wimbledon and a small place on the island of Alderney.

After marrying her second husband, the writer-director Blake Edwards, Andrews began holidaying in Gstaad. Returning in 1968, she wrote in her diary: "How I wish we were back in Switzerland. I know now that is where I really want to live." The couple bought a chalet and eventually made Switzerland their legal residence, though they kept homes in Beverly Hills and Malibu.

It was not always serene. A 1977 photograph shows Andrews at her father's home after her stepmother, Mrs. Winifred Wells, went missing in the woods for four days before returning. "We seemed to be forever flinging things together, living in a chaos of professional and financial obligations," Andrews wrote of that period.

In the early 1970s, while filming The Julie Andrews Hour, the family rented "a shabby but comfortable beach house situated on the bluffs in Malibu." After adopting two daughters from Vietnam, she and Edwards bought land adjacent to the rental in 1975; Edwards filmed S.O.B., with Andrews in a role, on the plot in 1980. They kept Malibu as their California base for 20 years, selling in 1992 and moving to Brentwood. Edwards died in 2010, after 41 years of marriage.

Today Andrews lives in Sag Harbor, near Emma Walton Hamilton. The pair have written more than 35 children's books together — on top of Andrews's two autobiographies — a body of work that stands one Tony short of an EGOT and shows no sign of slowing as she enters her tenth decade.