Julie Andrews shares a few favorite things

To most people, she’s the airborne nanny who won an Oscar for her

first movie role and introduced a new word to their vocabulary --

supercalifragilisticexpialidocious -- in “Mary Poppins,” or the more

down-to-earth nanny from the Oscar-winning “The Sound of Music.”

To others, mainly East Coast theatergoers now on Social Security,

she was the “squashed cabbage leaf” who passed for a Hungarian

princess in “My Fair Lady.” To those avid tube watchers who revered

the comic antics of Carol Burnett, she was “the other one” in those

occasional TV specials “Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall.”

Julie Andrews is all of these and more, but one thing she isn’t

anymore is a world-class singer. An operation to remove noncancerous

polyps from her vocal cords erased this talent from her resume a few

years ago, but she’s still here, as the old-time chorine from

“Follies” would boast.

For a few hours on Monday evening, she really was here -- here

being the Orange County Performing Arts Center -- to discuss a few of

her favorite things. Though the hall wasn’t alive with the sound of

music, it reverberated with thunderous applause when she took the

stage and when she left it.

Few performers are worthy of standing ovations on their entrance,

but Julie Andrews received two such ovations on consecutive days --

Monday at the Center and Sunday when she appeared at the Academy

Awards.

As though she were conducting an intimated living-room interview,

Andrews charmed the packed Segerstrom Hall with anecdotes from her

celebrated past.

She was one of those born-in-a-trunk performers, the daughter of

vaudeville entertainers, who developed her celebrated four-octave

range as a child and made her stage debut in a London musical revue

at the age of 12.

At 19, she made her first transatlantic crossing to become a

Broadway star in the American version of the English musical “The Boy

Friend” (which local audiences can check out at Golden West College

in May). Reluctant to spend two years away from her family, she

negotiated a one-year contract with the show.

This decision worked in her favor. Composers Alan Jay Lerner and

Frederick Loewe approached her with their idea of turning George

Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion” into a musical comedy. She would be

available -- and spent the next three and a half years working on her

pronunciation of “the rain in Spain” as the original Eliza Doolittle

in “My Fair Lady.”

Lerner and Loewe wisely cast Andrews in their next Broadway show,

“Camelot,” where “while Robert Goulet was singing ‘If Ever I Would

Leave You’ to me, I was admiring his legs,” she recalled Monday.

“Richard Burton’s weren’t bad, either.”

A backstage visitor at that show was Walt Disney, who asked if

she’d be interested in playing a magical British nanny in a movie

musical. Thus was born “Mary Poppins.”

She won a best actress Oscar for her first screen role -- a

distinction she shared with Audrey Hepburn, who was chosen over

Andrews to bring “My Fair Lady” to the screen, since the producers

“wanted a name actress.” Hepburn had won for her earlier debut in

“Roman Holiday,” but 1964 belonged to Julie Andrews.

Everyone remembers the opening scene in “The Sound of Music,” with

Andrews turning around, arms extended. On Monday, she took some of

the glamour off that moment by sharing a tidbit with the audience.

The sequence was shot from a helicopter, she said, and afterward, the

chopper would turn right above her, the wind draft knocking her

repeatedly to the ground -- take after take.

Her airborne scenes in “Mary Poppins” were accomplished with the

aid of a wired harness beneath her costume -- which snapped during

one scene, letting her crash to the stage below.

“I let loose with some very un-Poppins Anglo-Saxon verbs,” she

recalled.

The loss of her singing voice after a three-decade career -- in

which she got Oscar nominations for “The Sound of Music” and

“Victor/Victoria” -- hasn’t slowed this charismatic entertainer.

She’s been active in worldwide charity work, has written two

children’s books and will be featured in the upcoming TV movie

“Eloise” -- as a nanny.

As she has done for some four decades, Julie Andrews charmed her

admirers at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, and did so

without singing a note.

* TOM TITUS reviews local theater for the Daily Pilot. His

reviews appear Thursdays and Saturdays.