I chatted a lot with our floor manager, a charming, shy and extremely capable young man. I asked him what he would be working on after Cinderella was finished. He said, ‘Actually, I don’t think I will be doing television much longer.’ When I enquired why, he said that he was close to realizing a long-held dream of providing free Shakespearean performances in Central Park for the general public. I thought of the hard work he must have done to get something so unusual off the ground. I also wondered if his project could ever be successful. I remember wishing him luck. His name was Joseph Papp. His vision, of course, soon became a proud reality at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park and at the Joseph Papp Public Theatre in New York. - Julie Andrews on Joseph Papp (HOME A Memoir of My Early Years)
“Often I am asked how I felt about not landing the role of Eliza in the film version of My Fair Lady. I know Alan hoped that Warner Bros. would cast me but eventually the role was given to Audrey Hepburn. At the time, I completely understood their choice. Warner Bros. needed a big name for the marquee, and although I had starred on Broadway, that was a very small pond compared to the rest of America and the world. In later years, I did wish that I had been able to record my performance somehow, somewhere for posterity - or at least for my grandchildren. Audrey and I became good friends, and one day she said to me, ‘Julie, you should have done the role… but I didn’t have the guts to turn it down.’”
- Julie Andrews; an excerpt from Home: A Memoir of My Early Years.
- Julie Andrews (around the age of 9 or 10), an excerpt from Home: A Memoir of My Early Years
The very first thing that I can recall was when I was perhaps two or three. I remember standing in the middle of the staircase, neither up nor down, and telling my mother that I wanted to go to the bathroom.
‘Well, come on down,’ she said, to which I replied, ‘No.’
‘Go on up then,’ she said.
Again, ‘No.’
I obviously wanted her to come and attend to me.
‘Well stay there, then,’ she said. So I did. And I peed in my pants.
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