Twentieth-Century Divas: Julie Andrews - Dominic Broomfield-McHugh

I am delighted to be giving the last lecture in this series on divas. But I have to say that when I first announced the topic of this series, I did get one question and reaction quite a lot, which was is Julie Andrews a diva? Indeed, one or two people have been very angry with me about just including her. So I'm having to do something which I didn't expect to do, which is to address why I think that she's a diva. And I thought I would jump straight in with this one. So I give you an example from her debut film in 1964. You may have seen it called Mary Poppins, of what I think of as an undoubted diva moment. Will we ever be able to see beyond the current observable universe? Oh, it's much worse than that. The observable universe is shrinking. If you want to know what are my odds of winning the lottery, you come straight to probability. Yeah, because probability is all about how likely or not events are to happen. I think the chance of there being an undiscovered second species, very like humans out there in the world today is pretty slender. However, And these are the pictures, if you haven't seen them. I mean, New York was orange. The air was orange. They said one day out in that air was like smoking a pack of cigarettes. It had the same effect on the lungs as smoking a number of cigarettes. So people who'd never smoked in their life were suddenly going to suffer some of the same health effects. Any further questions is a brand new podcast from Gresham College, A place where we ask our speakers all of your questions that went unanswered following their lecture guests have included Ronald Hutton, Robin May, Chris Lin tot, Sarah Hart and Maggie snowing. Any further questions? All episodes are available wherever you listen to your podcasts. The honey bees that fetch the nectar from the flowers to the comb, never tired of ever buzzing to and fro, because they take a little nip from every flower that they sipp. And hence, and heads they find, they find their task is not right. Cheeky. It calls to mind a kind of diva that we haven't looked at yet in the series, one that is less serious perhaps than some of the more heavyweight kinds of divas that we've looked at. And it reminded me of something that I saw quite recently, which was a famous concert that Maria Callis, one of the undoubted divas of the middle of the 20th century, gave in Paris in 1958. And in the middle of this very serious program of Opera Arias, she sang Rina's Aria from the Barbara Seville, which is a comic piece. And something about the personality of this performance reminds me of the Mary Poppins moment as a way to kind of contextualize something about their characters. So let's have a quick look at this clip. Oh God, You see, you can generate power and therefore be a diva through humor and charm, and not just through being serious and kind of belting people in this very heavy way. And so if we return to my magic matrix of Diva words, which I've shown in the previous lectures this time, is I have turned all the pejorative words that we might associate with the concept of the Diva Red, because I think most of them don't really apply to Julie Andrews' public image, but most of the green ones do. She is talented and an idol and an icon and outstanding. And in her case, she has achieved this a lot through the likeness of her voice. And initially through her chole of tour singing and her high singing, and a lot of her early film appearances contain these moments where she shows off the top of her voice at strategic moments. So here's an example from a 1968 film called Star, which you may or may not have known. It was a big flop. And at the end of this song, the has saga of Jenny, she shows off how high she can sing. Anyone with vision Comes To this decision, you must Never, ever, never. It's a bit like waiting for the number 10 buses. Now. It goes on forever. And it seems to me that the power of her voice was the thing that really articulated her as a great diva in the sixties, even if these performances tend to be fun rather than severe. And even her most iconic moment on screen in the whole of her career strikes me as a diva moment. Because although she's dressed in an incredibly plain way, there is something about the way that it's filmed with a helicopter zooming in with a camera attached to it. And the way that the orchestra builds thanks to a brilliant arrangement by owing costal that leads us to have this kind of impact that to me only belongs to a diva Alive with the sound of music. I mean, she climbs up to the mountains and gets the camera to come to her. So how much of a diva can you be? And all of this goes back to the very beginning of her career, which was when she was a child, and she was, she became known very quickly as Britain's youngest prima donna because of the impact of her voice, and in particular, her first really major appearance at the age of 12 in a variety show called Starlight Roof. And you can see her name in that photograph on the right there, one of the smallest names in the billing, of course, because she's not a major star. And, but she's appearing alongside a number of major stars. And when we look at the reviews of this performance, we can see that they consistently talk about her as actually outshining the stars on opening night. And they use words like Radiant and primadonna to describe her. So I think of these as synonyms of the word diva. So I'm gonna stop going on about why I think she's a diva at this point. But again, the review in the stage calls her a youthful primadonna, fully entitled to her remarkable reception for some beautiful singing, the rather quain titled Accordion Times a Musical Express, which wasn't around for nearly long enough, as far as I'm concerned, referred to her as the kid who stops the show in the first half. And I found this lovely column from November 19, uh, 47. So a week after Starlight Roof opened. And it, um, it's been very badly scanned by the Hollywood reporter. So I've transcribed it for you, and it begins, ever heard of Julie Andrews? Nope. Well, I guess you soon will. She walked onto the stage of the London Hippodrome, where Vic Oliver's new show, starlike Roof was being premiered last night, sang in a voice of exquisite purity, the pollies from Menon, during which she reached F above top C and brought the house down. You see folks, Julie is only 12 years old, and that's why she was the hit of the evening. Now, the following march, she went into a recording studio and actually recorded this, um, little performance. So I thought that we would listen to some of it. Now, we haven't got all night, so I have very UNM musically removed the middle of the song, but it begins with a little conversation between Julie Andrews and Vic Oliver, who was the guy who was the sort of lead figure in this review, and it ends with her Cura dynamics. So take a listen to the 12-year-old Julie Andrews. Ladies and gentlemen, I have great pleasure introducing to you our youngest soprano from Starlight Roof, Julie Andrews. Well, Julie, is this the first time you've ever made a gramophone record? Oh, yes. Is it your first record too? Not exactly. No. How old are you? I'm 12. How old are you? Um, I think I'll better ask the questions. What are you going to sing for us? I'd like to sing the pollies From Meme. Oh, lovely. Just the kind of junk I like You really couldn't get away with this in the Opera House. And indeed, she's not really using vibrato most of the way through that, which is very peculiar in operatic terms. And I'm certainly not saying that she's a a Maria callous type of singer, but there is something impactful there, and it really caused a stir. I found this interview from November, 1947 with a man who was a ventriloquist, who appeared in the very first Royal Command performance in 1912. And he started agitating to say that she should be allowed to be in the royal variety performance. And the following October it was announced that she would appear as a featured artist alongside Danny Kay, who was a major star by this point, um, and sing her great aria in the royal variety performance. And she led the national anthem. So she was really going up in at least the country, if not the world, by the age of 13 at this point. And it might be easy to think from all of this, that therefore she had this rosy upbringing and easy ascent. But in actual fact, it's very clear from her autobiography that her background was very difficult. Her father, Ted Wells, was a teacher of woodwork and metalwork. Her mother was a pianist. And when they were, when she was about seven years old, when Julie was about seven years old, her parents broke up and her mother went off with a professional singer from Canada called Ted Andrews. So two Teds, both Father Fi father figures, which is a bit complicated. And they renamed her from Julia Wells to Julie Andrews, and she was forced to take her stepfather's name. And then when she was 15 or so, she describes having been taken to a party of a family friend. Um, and then afterwards on the way home, her mother told her that that was her biological father. So she then had a third father figure in her life whom, um, she seems not to have really engaged with, and she very much regarded Tedd wells as her father figure. But you can see that life was very difficult. Something else, um, that happened was that then she went to live in London during the Blitz with her stepfather and her mother, and she talks about going to live in Mornington Crescent, what a occur, and having to, um, live in this apartment where there wasn't enough space for them all to sleep. So a room in the basement of the building was taken over some kind of utility room, and she describes how two barred windows revealed a wall mere inches behind them. The place was freshened up, but after the first 24 hours, we kept the lights on, she says all night as rats would emerge and creep along the pipe. So another difficult part of her childhood. And then she jo, she joined her, um, stepfather and Mother's act, and they started going around the country together, but eventually she was hired to do performances on her own. So for example, when all three of them were in Blackpool, her stepfather and mother were appearing on the kind of end of the Pier show, and she was appearing at the Blackpool Hippodrome Theater in a, a kind of much more significant production. So this too caused some tension. She then started to, um, encounter puberty and started to find that her voice was changing. And she said that I found I was losing the top note notes of my voice, and it was beginning to mature. So the white thin quality that had defined her cura was becoming warmer, richer. And she began to worry. She says, since the little girl with the high voice image was still her gimmick. So she talks very vividly in her book about the kind of the difficult transition she had to make already at this point in her career when she was still kind of a mid teenager into a different kind of performer. And one of the things she did was to perform, um, the first of her major musical theater roles, which was Polly in the Boyfriend on Broadway. And what's noticeable to me, having re-watched all her films recently and thought about them all is how often she has played a character who undergo, undergo some kind of change and becomes somebody else often quite quickly during the story in thoroughly modern Millie, she stops being this prim Edwardian woman and becomes a flapper within about 30 seconds at the beginning of the film. But that plot point becomes a tension throughout the story that the whole time she's pretending to be someone that she's not. And of course, in my Fair Lady, she's a flower girl, pretends to be a Duchess in two versions of Cinderella, she becomes a princess in the sound of music. She goes from being a nun into a Baroness and all the rest of it. And it seems to me that this aspect of transformation is at the heart of her success as a performer, in that she seems to embody this sense of, um, social mobility that a lot of the audience could feel. My Fair Lady was her really big breakthrough role in 1956 on Broadway. It ran for six and a half years, although not with her. It got the best reviews of a Generation. People said it was the best musical for 25 years. And so she had real impact here, did it on Broadway, and then came and did it in London. But famously, she was replaced in the 1964 Jack Warner film version by Audrey Hein, who was the biggest star at the time. And this is something that was discussed quite openly at the time, indeed, by Julie Andrews herself, who went off and made Mary Poppins instead of My Fair Lady. And she performed quite a zinga when she accepted her award at the Golden Globes that year, and thanked Jack Warner for not having cast her in My Fair Lady, because if she'd done it, she would've ended up not winning the Oscar and the Golden Globe. For finally My thanks to a man who made a wonderful movie and who made all this possible in the first place, Mr. Jack Warner, Never tell me she's not a diva. Let's consider, um, quite briefly the differences or the difference between Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews's performance in this role. I mean, we could go on for an hour just about this point of analysis, but trying to encapsulate what I think one of the big points of difference between them is, let's take a look at the second verse of the song. Show me from the second half of the story. First of all, we're gonna see Audrey Hepburn with Jeremy Brett there, both of them dubbed in the film. And, um, Hepburn is dubbed by Marni Nixon, who dubbed many famous actresses, um, in Hollywood To be a dream. Say one more word and a scream, having your arms hunger for mine. Please don't explain, show me, show me. Don't wait until and pop out all over. It is a beautifully filmed moment, but it's quite sung by Marni Nixon, which you can understand because in films we don't tend to get that so much of that kind of acty type of singing. But if we look at Julie Andrews doing the same number almost around the same time. This is from a television special. Unfortunately, the, the, um, it's, it's a bit too bright and overexposed, but you can still get a sense of how different her characterization is, especially from the point of view of her singing. Haven't your lip for my touch and don't say how much. Show me, show me. Don't talk of love lasting through time. Make me no lying apart. Show now. Sing me no song. Leave me no rhyme. Don't waste my time. Show Me Don't talk, don't talk, don't talk At all. Show Me. But never do I ever want to hear another word. There isn't one I haven't heard. We are together and not ought to be a dream. Say one more word and I'll scream, haven't your arms for, please don't, and show me, show me. Don't wait until wrinkles and lines pop. Sure. There's something much more vigorous about the way that she does it. And to me, the thing that she does is to keep alive the flower girl, bit of Eliza Doolittle. And it's partly through the singing. She does an awful lot of acting through her singing, and it's not got that same sweet quality that we get in Marni Nixon's version, and which seems to hold Audrey Hepburn back in that song and in a lot of her songs. And one, I don't really blame Marni Nixon at all. I think it's a very difficult gig to get to dub Audrey Hepburn in My Fair Lady. And indeed, Audrey Hepburn is already kind of the duchess when she sets out, so a very difficult, um, task for her, whereas Andrews kind of understands this journey a bit more and manages to express it. The other thing that started to come through in some of these earlier appearances, this one is from Rogers and Cinderella, which was a, a television musical written especially for her. And, um, broadcast, uh, it is said to over a hundred million people in March, 1957 performed live. Is that the, um, first octave of her voice? The lower part of her voice is incredibly expressive because she's a soprano. She doesn't have to work too hard to create the singing in that part of her voice, but she's able to really finesse the sound and put the yearning across. And I've chosen a bit of the duet from Cinderella that she performs with the Prince to kind of encapsulate that feeling because I do think she has the ability to touch listeners and viewers through her singing in a way that's quite particular Why She went on to play more royalty in her next Broadway appearance, which was the, the musical Camelot. And as is well known, this was a very troubled production whereby the designer died before they even started rehearsing. And the director had a heart attack, and the writer ended up in hospital as well. So it was very difficult for them to refine a very difficult story, uh, exactly the period where they needed to. But what's interesting is looking at the reviews of Camelot when it was in Boston before it had made it to New York, is that the audience is clearly reacting very badly to the spectacle of Julie Andrews as Queen g Guinevere, cheating on King Arthur with Learn Lot Dulac because it was Julie Andrews. So for the first time, she was encountering the problems of her own image in wanting, in doing what she wanted to do artistically. And it was a difficult experience. I think she writes very movingly in her memoirs about how she feels about live theater. And I'm sorry to read out such a long quote, but I think it's so particular having read both of her memoirs. Now. The way that she writes about this is quite different from the way she writes about anything else. So let's take a look. She says to describe now what theater means to me and what the work feels like is difficult. One is usually so busy attempting to find answers and hone them into honesty, focusing on the moment and its progression, sending it out, and finding the well of energy that it takes my feelings about it shift and change on any given day. Once in a while, I experience an emotion on stage that's so gut wrenching, so heart stopping that I could weep with gratitude and joy. The feeling catches and magnifies so rapidly that it threatens to engulf me. It starts as a base note resonating deep in my system. Literally, it's like the warmest lowest sound from a contra base. There's a sudden thrill of connection and awareness of size. Um, this, the theater itself where history has been absorbed, where darkness contains mystery and light has meaning. Light is a part of it to be flooded with it, to absorb it and allow it through the body. Most of all, it's the music. When a great sweep of sound makes you attempt things that earlier in the day, you might never have thought possible. When the orchestra swells to support your voice when the melody is perfect, and the words so right there could not possibly be any others. And that is the moment to share it. One sense is the audience feeling it too. And together you ride the ecstasy all the way home. So she doesn't write about recording albums like this or about making films like this or being in a pantomime like this. She's very specific about the medium, and yet she didn't appear in a musical again for over 30 years on the stage. And instead she went to Hollywood and became a movie star. And what I really like looking at the, the list of the first seven films that she made in Hollywood is that she really was a proper movie star. I think that probably the general public doesn't always realize this about her, but only the movies in green are musicals. And the other one are, the other ones are non-musical films. So for example, the Americanization of Emily is a very serious, interesting anti-war movie quite ahead of its time. She's very good in it. Torn curtain is one of Hitchcock's slightly weaker films, but she's very good in it. She plays the fiance of, um, Paul Newman, who is a scientist, an American scientist, and who appears to defect to East Germany, but is actually going to try and find out how far they have developed their anti-missile systems and what they understand about it. So poor Julie goes along for the ride and doesn't know whether he's doing bad things or good things, and she has to embody through quite a weak screenplay that feeling that the audience feels of not knowing what's going on because it's not revealed for quite a long time. But the one that really stuck with me rewatching all these films was Hawaii, which is definitely a problematic and not a, a brilliant piece of screen making. It's over two and a half hours long in its complete version. And it's one of those epic 1960s Hollywood films that seem to go on forever. They've had so much money thrown at them that the, the story gets a bit buried and it's certainly a problematic story in some ways. But there is a scene two hours into the film, which we're going to see a bit of where she confronts the character of her husband. So her husband is a Calvinist missionary who's gone to Hawaii to introduce Christianity. Not at all problematic. And by this point in the film, the population has started to die off because of a me measles outbreak. So lots of people die, and her husband takes a very hard view of this and says it was God's will that they died. And finally, Julie, he's been given lots of very passive scenes to play up to this point, speaks the conscience of the audience, and kind of articulates the problems with colonialism. If I did not believe I could not call myself a Christian, Then I will no longer call myself a Christian. I don't believe in your God of wrath. I don't believe karaoke is in hell either. I believe he has found God and malama with him and Klo and all those who died there on the beach. But it's impossible for the unbaptized to enter heaven Ho abna. I've never seen a people more generous, more loving, more filled with Christian sweetness than these. I will not believe that God has rejected them simply because they haven't been baptized. Not even that lost child whose birth you cursed. These things are God's will, Not mine. What else? But God's wrath has the power to annihilate them, Disease despair, our lack of love, our inability to find them beautiful, our contempt for their ways, our lust for their land, our greed, our arrogance. That is what kills the abna. It's really interesting seeing her in these non-musical roles because there's none of the trappings of the sound of music here. And she's very good in most of these films. She, I think she's been very misfortunate in being the best thing about a number of these less famous films. And she often manages to transcend a very mixed material. Anyway, in the middle of this period, she also made the first of her, um, famous television specials with the Broadway star and TV star Carol Burnett. And they did a rather cheeky thing, which was to take over the classical music venue, Carnegie Hall, and to, um, put on a kind of review show, a bit like the kind that she would've known as a child and kind of mock all kinds of things that were going on in society at the time. And the one that became by far the most significant to her career, although she would not know it yet, I believe was a number called from Switzerland, the Pratt family. We are the happy Swiss Family Prep. Oh, ladies, We bring you a happy song that I used to sing when I was a happy nun back home in Switzerland And yogurt and good and bread Puddings and starches and dunkings like that. What makes we like best are these pigs and cheese. And what this helps us to tap into is the fact that when the Sound of Music opened in 1959 and ran in New York, it was a big hit, very popular. It was by Rogers and Hammerstein and Lindsay and Kra was great writers of the day, but it was also an open joke amongst a lot of the more sophisticated people in New York. And, uh, and so in this number of course, they are mocking the song, my Favorite Things, and they go on to mock some of the other songs from the Sound of Music, which helps to explain why when they made the film, the sound of music changes had to be happen, and some of these had to happen. Some of these changes were just to address the fact that she was a different kind of singer from Mary Martin who'd played the role of Maria Von Trap on Broadway. So for example, at the end of the song Dore Me, Mary Martin does a, a long scale downwards and shows how low she can sing. Whereas in the film version, they change it to show off Julie's high B flat. In fact, it's a particularly fruity note that she comes out with at the end that Such was the popularity of the sound of music amongst the public, that there became this sort of fatigue of poor Julie Andrews. And when I was rewatching the second of the specials that she made with Carol Burnett, I found in this big medley that they did of hits from the 1960s, there's a moment where Carol Burnett seems to speak for all of the snooty critics of the East Coast of America when she interrupts Julie Andrews singing a song that we've already heard, oh, Pull Yourself Together. It's just a song. I mean, remember just a spoon full of sugar. It's the medicine go down. Just, I mean, she very successive successfully sends herself up here. But there is something about the o shut up that seems to encapsulate something slightly wider culturally, to be fair, that the initial critic's reactions to the film, the sound of music were generally quite negative, especially from the East Coast critics and Julie herself got generally positive reviews, but the film itself was completely reviled and no one, um, in the press thought that this was gonna be a big hit. And so I wanted to show you some of the clips from the review. For example, in the New Yorker, I felt myself drowning in a pit of sticky sweet whipped cream, not of the first freshness <laugh>. And then there's a very famous review in a women's magazine called McCall's, where supposedly, and I dunno if it's true, but I suspect it's true, supposedly the critic was sacked from her job as a result of saying this about the sound of music. It's the sugarcoated lie that people seem to want to eat. And it is the attitude that makes a critic feel that maybe it's hopeless. Why not just send the director Robert Weiser wire? You win, I give up. And the New York Times was unkind soon at too and said, the adults are fairly horrendous, especially poor Christopher Plummer. And a few days after this review, um, Bosley Crower of the New York Times wrote a special feature called the Soundness of Musicals, and basically said that the sound of music was gonna be the end of the movie musical form because it had set the musical film back 20 years with disappointing reversions to the old operetta form. It's all sterile, it has a musical film, it's not fresh, it's not sound. So I think when things started to go wrong for her, they were kind of pleased. Although according to the Guinness Book of World Records, 2015, it has had or had had a worldwide gross of over $2.3 billion. So in the midst of all of this, her life came under great pressure. And in this interview, which we'll see a clip of now, she starts talking about the personal impact that all of this success had. I mean, in 1965 when the sound of Music opened, she was only 30 years old and she'd already been working for 20 years. It's kind of crackers, and she started to slightly fall apart. I was so busy doing and absorbing and, and having considerable success just hit me that I think a, it knocked me sideways a little bit because you can imagine there was a great deal of an assault by press and publicity and, and and things like that. But secondly, I didn't have much time to get perspective on it all. Not until much, much later. Uh, and her first marriage to the designer, um, Tony Walton fell apart at this point. And a couple of years later, she met and married the director, Blake Edwards, best known for things like the Pink Panther and Breakfast at Tiffany. So one of the great directors of America. But these were two very different people. And one of the consequences of their marriage is that they did decide to work together quite a bit. And if we look at the next 20 years of her, uh, movie output, we can see that the majority of them were directed by him, only two of them musicals. Now, this was problematic in a way because they were very different as artists, both exceptional but very different in style. And he went in a lot of the time for a very broad kind of humor as we see from things like the Pink Panther. And she, to me, is all about finesse. And so finding points of meeting was often quite difficult. There were points of meeting, including, in my opinion, the opening song of that first film they made together. Darling Lily, which I think I've mis misspelled. It's with one L in the Middle. Anyway, um, the opening number of this film that they made together, the first one, darling Lily, really shows how well they could work together. Take a look at this. Often I think my heart has given and I new face I some new neighbor. The It's so intimate and beautiful and the the use of the lights in it are so spectacular that you believe you're about to sit down and watch the most intriguing and wonderful film that you've ever seen in your life. Because she's singing so beautifully here and, and she's using the lower point of her, of her voice quite significantly going below Middle Sea. It's quite low for a soprano. But from there you discover that the film is going to be a kind of spoof about an English performer who is actually has German spider during in the First World War. And at times it descends into Pink Panther type of humor and kind of unsettles the magic of what we're seeing there. It was a terrible box office disaster and critical disaster, and brought an end to her musicals for some years. In 1974, they made a thriller together called The Tamarind Seed with Omar Sharif, which is actually a very watchable film, as I reminded myself the other week, a very good film, but it's not a, an exceptional film and not an important film. And then after that, it was five years before she made another film, and she appeared in one of Blake Edwards' most iconic movies, 10 opposite Dudley Moore, who is the real main character of the movie. The problem with this one, as far as she's concerned is that, again, she's exceptionally good and very sassy in the film, but she plays the long suffering girlfriend. Well, Dudley Moore is obsessed in a rather predatory way with Bo Derek, and he's having a sort of midlife crisis and she just is there on the sidelines getting a bit fed up. So for example, we can see in this little clip how sassy she is and how much she stands up for herself. But really, I'm not sure how this is enhancing her overall image. First, I'm getting a little fed up at sexually emancipated ladies being referred to as broads. Second, I think a telescope aimed at anything other than the stars is an invasion of privacy and qualifies the voyeur as a peeping tom. And there's a very good law against that. Third, the first two really wouldn't bother me a bit if you'd stop watching, say god damn much television and pay a little more attention to your bedroom guests, this guest in particular. Now you wanna argue or you wanna make love, It's very good, but it's kind of how it's contributing to her image overall. I'm not sure other than it shows she can be tough and certainly she's moving away there from her sound of music, Mary Poppins type of image. But because she's kind of secondary to the story, it's a bit frustrating that she doesn't have something meaty to do. But there was one film they made together, which was a big hit called Victor Victoria in 1982. And this seemed like a great meeting of, um, the, the mixtures of their artistic temperaments, if you like. She is given this role of Victor, who is a female impersonator. So she's pretending to be a man, pretending to be a woman, and it allows her to show off that lower point part of the voice that we've seen developing gradually over these years of her career. And again, he, Blake Edwards employs the same sorts of filming and lighting techniques, especially in this song, crazy World that we've seen at the beginning of Darling Ailey. So it's a bit like he goes back into his toolbox and brings out something again that worked very well and this time makes a hit of it Crazy world full of crazy contradictions like a child. First you drive me wide and then you win heart minute, and then temperamental has a storm. Just when I believe your heart's getting warmer, you cold and your cold and eye like a fool Tried On to. If my pitching is correct, I think she goes down to an E below middle C, which is very low indeed for someone that's famous as soprano. And so there is some kind of artistic growth for her here in that she's setting up the ability to be very expressive in a different part of her voice. And though the, um, the RP that received pronunciation for which she's so famous really comes into play here because she's able to use those vowel sounds and make this really beautiful, expressive and intimate sound that the camera really loves her. Here you can feel Blake Edwards sort of loving her and really wanting to show her off her absolute best and show her off in a new way. The two films that I have found most curious, revisiting her entire output, both came out in 1986. The um, the first one was that's Life, which was the last film that she made with Blake Edwards and which was completely improvised. He wrote, uh, a kind of treatment, so a description of what everyone should be improvising about. But basically they gathered a load of their friends and colleagues and made a film together a heavily autobiographical film about Blake Edwards and kind of covered up by pretending that Jack Lemon is an, well, he plays an architect, but he's supposed to be Blake Edwards. But what's psychologically interesting in the film is that she plays a singer who in the opening scene of the film, is shown undergoing a biopsy on her throat for a growth that has been found. And so in the second scene of the film, we see her in a car having a discussion with her doctor about whether it's benign or malign.'cause they're gonna have to wait all weekend to find out, um, what this is going to mean for her future. And so this becomes incredibly psychologically curious because 11 years later, this kind of thing sort of happened to her in that she underwent very famously on operation. And so watching this particular click now where she ends with a particular question really has taken on a new meaning that is remarkable given what subsequently happened and is very famous. Are you gonna tell anyone what four? Sometimes if it's benign, I'll hit it. See above top C No, no, not a great idea. Oh, if it's malignant, they'll know soon enough about it anyway. What if it is malignant? I'll talk about that when we know I wanna talk about it. Now. Am I gonna be able to sing again This question? Am I gonna be able to sing again? It just sits there in midair because of course this became the big question of the latter part of her career. The other film from 1986 Duet for one, which was based on a play, she plays a violinist who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis before the film begins. And the film is about how a violinist is going to come to terms with not being able to play the violin anymore. So both of these films asked the question, what is an artist who can't make art anymore? Um, the fact that they were back to back and both filmed when she was 50 years old, it all seems psychologically rather heavy in hindsight, IE not just another film, it seems to have this autobiographical dimension before we get to her vocal crisis. She did return to the stage for two productions. First of all, in 1993, she was in, uh, a review of Stephen Sondheim's songs and got largely exceptionally good reviews. It said, um, for example, in variety looking and sounding as though it's been 30 days since her last stage appearance instead of 30 years, Julie Andrews is radiant in her return. So very good review indeed. And some of the songs that are allocated to her provide new opportunities to show off particularly entertaining skills. So for example, here is a song called Getting Married Today. Ah, If, Pardon me, is everybody there? Because if everybody's there, I want to thank you all for coming to the wedding. I'd appreciate you going even more. I mean, you must have lots of better things to do, and not a word of it to Paul. Remember Paul, you know, the man I'm gonna marry, but I'm not because I wouldn't ruin anyone as wonderful as he is. Thank you all for the gifts and the flowers. Thank you all. Now it's back to the showers. Don't tell Paul that I'm not getting married today. This is someone having a nervous breakdown on their wedding day and sort of remembering it in, in a very tense way. And I, I guess that they felt that since she had managed Supercalifragilistic xpi, she could manage that one. And then the big return to the stage was the stage version of Victor Victoria from 1995. So she had turned 60 in this one, and this was the, the final big production of her career. And it did cause her problems in the end because of the fatigue involved. But the filmed version of it, it was filmed for Japanese television, and you can get it on DVD now, reveals that she's still incredibly expressive down there in that lower part of her voice, Living in the, From the Sunlight, Hiding from the one that might. So she was still very much Julie Andrews, but during this production, it run for 20 months. It took a long time for it to make its money back. And although she did have some holiday time, she started to miss some performances, um, towards the end of the run, uh, because of vocal fatigue. And as she has talked about in many interviews, they found, um, a problem in her throat and her surgeon advised her to get surgery. And as is well known, this led her to lose her singing voice. And it became a big issue that was discussed widely in the press. They settled out of court. The figure has never been confirmed, but it was said to be something like 20 million was how much she was, um, given as a, a settlement. So a really difficult, um, moment for her because she was not able to end her singing career and her artistic career on her own terms. However, in October, 2000, so now 65, she was invited to host a concert on Broadway called My Favorite Broadway, the Love Songs. And so she was just introducing everything and at the end, Michael Crawford came on and sang, I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face from My Fair Lady, and the reviewer in Variety reports that, um, after the end of the song, Andrews sidled up to him to utter the rain in Spain, stays mainly on the plane. She then sang the vocal reply on the plane. On the plane by George. He's got it. Andrews will sing again. Amir half dozen notes brought a capacity audience cheering to its feet, celebrating a comeback for that singing voice since botched throat surgery rubbed the public of her glorious tones. And thankfully it was filmed, The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plane. She's got it. I think she's got it. The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plane By George's. Got it. By George's. Got it. Now, once again, where does it rain? On the plane? On the plane, That sunny plane. And this shows us how context can have such an impact on an audience because she's hardly doing anything. She sings sort of three or four notes, and yet because everyone believed that she couldn't sing anymore, she was still able to have that impact and everybody cheered and stood up. So even now when she could no longer sing and she never did properly sing again, she proved that she was a diva. Thank you. Thank you so much Dominic, for that wonderful lecture. I'm Mil Murr Meki, the professor of Music here, and I'll be fielding some questions. There's some online already. Actually, this one came in eight weeks ago, so very keen, it's about time you answered it. And then perhaps after, we'll, um, send the microphone round for the room. And this Slido is still active if you are shy and want to send them to me directly. So Anonymous says, would you say that her enormous success in Mary Poppins and the sound of music came as both a curse and a blessing, loved by the whole world, but bracketed? I guess so, but I think at the time what happened was over exposure. So it wasn't so much that her image was necessarily set, although we saw a bit of self parody around that specific point in that Carol and, and Julie duet. But I think the problem was that when someone is successful in several films in a row, it's not so much the image that's the problem. It's the, the problem is that people start to resent seeing, you know, she's now in a Hitchcock film. And even the Hitchcock film did quite well commercially. It wasn't a flop. And, and so I think that it was that sort of fatigue and frustration and, and people went for her. And also she, it must have been very difficult for her, as I said in the lecture, to deal with having been performing since she was a child and just never stopped. You know, going from being in the London Palladium pantomime and then in the boyfriend on Broadway, and then my Fair Lady on Broadway, and then making these TV musicals and they're making Camelot and they're making Mary Poppy, it's, it's almost, it's too much success for anyone to really manage. It seems to me it must have been just exhausting psychologically. And, and there's almost a sense of, did did she lose a sense of who she was because she's just so caught up in, in being the public. Julie Andrews Speaking of that in a autobiography, um, you identified her love of singing live. She must have had enough power to choose those elements of her career. Did she not? Why do you think she had such a hiatus from singing live? Uh, well, she, um, had a daughter after Camelot. So, um, she had a sort of fairly short career break actually, but had a daughter and then went and made Mary Poppins and Walt Disney came to see Camelot and said, oh, come to Hollywood and, and make Mary Poppins. So she wasn't gonna turn that one down. And I guess then the succession of offers meant, you know, why, why wouldn't you do, why wouldn't you make all these movies and you can't be in both? And as we know, even today, often Hollywood stars want to be in stage productions, but then it takes up too much of their time and they can't make as much money. So yeah, she did have the power, but Thank you very much. Is there any truth to the rumor that she swore like a, uh, sailor on stage On stage Oh, oh, you in putting it together? Yes. Yes, she did.<laugh> I mean, that's, that's public knowledge. It's on the cast album, you can hear her swearing. And there are wonderful YouTube videos of outtakes, of television specials that she made where she swears a lot. So yes, she's swearing, but probably charming with it. Um, thank you for another excellent lecture. Um, I believe you said this is the last mm-Hmm, <affirmative> in the series. Um, if there were such a prize, who would you award the prize of? Uh, senior Diva of Diva Diva, Senior Diva. I think it would be misogynistic for me as a man to stand up and say, well, she's the biggest diva of them all. So, but, and, and what I've been trying to get at is, is sort of the, all three of these women, and indeed any women in this type of profession have a lot of texture to who they are and that there's many different elements to who they are and that they can be very different as women, but their performances can generate power for them as women. And something that I didn't have time to get into, but I was originally going to in the series was the idea of this being the period of second wave feminism. A time when women were struggling to get power in society and politically it was the period when the pill became available. It was all of those sorts of, um, things were being fought for. And to me it's about understanding these women as part of that period.'cause all three of them became big exactly in the 1960s. All three of them did some work before, but basically they are 1960s women. And that's why I call 'em 20th century divas. I think there's something very particular about the different kinds of femininity that they inhabit, but all three of them are powerful from it. The other thing I noticed, which I didn't expect to notice, is that all three of them had difficult upbringings. So there was a definite, uh, impulse for them to get out because Streisand lost her father.'cause he died. Bassey lost her father. All of them were brought up by stepfathers or other people. Things were very broken. They didn't, um, they weren't brought up with a lot of money. So that need to use their power for their voices, for power and make careers and make money was uh, common to all three of them, even though Julie Andrews and Shirley Bassie are completely different in so many other respects. And the other thing is all three of them had to stop singing at some point in their career for one reason or another.'cause Bassie had psychological problems around the death of her daughter. Streisand got stage fright. Andrews had the operation, and all three of them managed to get singing again. So that was something else that I admire about them. And seems part of this feeling that they're powerful women, even though they sound completely different, and how they present themselves is completely different. So I'm not willing to say one is more of a DJ<laugh>. I have one here. Why do you think that Julie Andrews hour, which you might know of, which she did in 72, 73, tanked, oh dear. mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, she Dance, dance, sang and had famous people on that never caught on with the audience. Was that part of fatigue or it was early fatigue? I think it's part of fatigue. I think, um, this was a, a sort of television variety, concert show type of thing that she made. It's a very 1950s, 1960s concept. So to be doing it in 1972, I think was part of the, the problem. And I've seen some of it, and I think that the quality is very mixed. And she talks about that herself in her book where, you know, having to dream up an hour of television singing and routines every week for weeks and weeks, right, is, is too much. So they probably would've needed to take two years to plan it and then execute it. I think there's something like 24 episodes, 22 episodes, so half of the year is taken up with making these specials. Oh God. One of the common things has come out all, all free divas that you've covered seems to be a sense that sometimes not taking themselves quite so seriously, being able to send themselves up. Mm-Hmm.<affirmative>, do you think that's part of the power of being a a, a diva, do you think? Yes, I do, but, and, and it's where sometimes actually Streisand has slightly struggled with that. She's, she's done it sometimes, but not so much. And I think it's about acknowledging how some of the audience feels. So by acknowledging that some of these things are said about them and then lampooning it, they're actually able to take back the power through that process. Whereas if they try to ignore that people, um, are making fun of them or aren't taking them very seriously, then you sort of become more of a self parody. Whereas for her to allow herself to sit there and sing a spoonful of sugar and have Carol Burnett tell her to shut up, it was just clever because it's acknowledging what people are perhaps feeling, even though the audience cheers when she starts singing the song. And she had many admirers and followers, it's not the case that everyone turned against her. It's just I think that she, she came up across, um, problems with the press and they were, they were already after the Sound of Music when it first opened. So when she started making things like, um, star and Darling Lily that are, um, objectively weaker films and not so coherent and, and maybe lack sparkle, then, you know, they were ready to pounce on her. So being able to laugh at herself, I think was indeed a powerful thing to do. Well with that, I'd like to thank Dominic for a wonderful lecture, a wonderful series, and we look forward to next year's lectures. Thanks.