Dame Julia Elizabeth Andrews, DBE (née Wells; born 1 October 1935) is a British film and stage actress, singer, and author.
She is the recipient of Golden Globe, Emmy, Grammy, BAFTA, People’s Choice Award, Theatre World Award, Screen Actors Guild and Academy Award honours.
Andrews was a former British child actress and singer who made her Broadway debut in 1954 with The Boy Friend, and rose to prominence starring in other musicals such as My Fair Lady and Camelot, and in musical films such as Mary Poppins (1964), for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, and The Sound of Music (1965): the roles for which she is still best-known. Her voice, which originally spanned four octaves, was damaged by a throat operation in 1997.
Andrews had a revival of her film career in 2000s in family films such as The Princess Diaries (2001), its sequel The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement (2004), the Shrek animated films (2004–2010), and Despicable Me (2010). In 2003 Andrews revisited her first Broadway success, this time as a stage director, with a revival of The Boy Friend at the Bay Street Theatre, Sag Harbor, New York (and later at theGoodspeed Opera House, in East Haddam, Connecticut in 2005).
Andrews is also an author of children’s books, and in 2008 published an autobiography, Home: A Memoir of My Early Years.
 
As a result of her performance in Mary Poppins, Andrews won the 1964 Academy Award for Best Actress and the 1965 Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy. She and her Mary Poppins co-stars also won the 1965 Grammy Award for Best Album for Children. As a measure of “sweet revenge,” as Poppins songwriter Richard M. Sherman put it, Andrews closed her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes by saying, “And, finally, my thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner.” Warner passed over Andrews in favor of Audrey Hepburn for the starring role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.
In 1964 she appeared opposite James Garner in The Americanization of Emily (1964), which she has described as her favourite film.[29] In 1966, Andrews won her second Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Musical or Comedy and was also nominated for the 1965 Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music.
After completing The Sound Of Music, Andrews appeared as a guest star on the NBC-TV variety series The Andy Williams Show, which gained her an Emmy nomination. She followed this television appearance with an Emmy Award-winning color special, The Julie Andrews Show, which featured Gene Kelly and The New Christy Minstrels as guests. It aired on NBC-TV in November 1965.
