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Nabaza.net-The MarketPlace - Julie Andrews: An Intimate Biography
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List Price: $27.95
Our Price: $18.45
Your Save: $ 9.50 ( 34% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
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Average Customer Rating:   
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Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 791.4028092
EAN: 9780312380250
ISBN: 0312380259
Label: St. Martin's Press
Manufacturer: St. Martin's Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 384
Publication Date: 2008-03-18
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Release Date: 2008-03-18
Studio: St. Martin's Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Julie Andrews is the last of the great Hollywood musical stars, unequaled by any in her time. In My Fair Lady, Julie Andrews had the biggest hit on Broadway. As the title character in Mary Poppins, she won an Academy Award. And, in 1965, The Sound of Music made her the most famous woman in the world and rescued Twentieth Century Fox from bankruptcy. Three years later, the disastrous Star! almost put the studio back under, and the leading lady of both films fell as spectacularly as she had risen. Her film career seemed over. Yet Julie Andrews survived, with what Moss Hart, director of My Fair Lady, called “that terrible British strength that makes you wonder why they lost India.” Victor/Victoria, directed by her second husband, Blake Edwards, reinvented her screen image---but its stage version in 1997 led to the devastating loss of her defining talent, her singing voice. Against all odds, she has fought back again, with leading roles in The Princess Diaries and Shrek 2. The real story of bandy-legged little Julia Wells from Walton-on-Thames is even more extraordinary; fresh details of her family background have only recently come to light. This is the first completely new biography of Julie Andrews as artist, wife, and mother in over thirty-five years---combining the author’s interviews with the star and his wide-ranging and riveting research. It is a frank but affectionate portrait of an enduring icon of stage and screen, who was made a Dame in the Millenium Honours List. Once dubbed “the last of the really great broads” by Paul Newman, she was the only actress in the 2002 BBC poll The 100 Greatest Britons. But who was Dame Julie, and who is she now? This is her story.
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: A Fair Biography of a Fair Lady
Comment: Julie Andrews is one of my heroes. I wanted to read a biography rather than her recently published autobiography (which I have not read so cannot make a fair comparison) because other researchers tend to include things the subject might delete when writing about his/her own life. This record of her life seems very complete, maybe too much so at times, which is why I gave it only four stars.
One of the great tragedies of modern times was the botched surgery that took her singing voice. This situation is dealt with in the opening paragraphs of the book, stating that she had sued the surgeons and hospital and got a settlement.
Her meteoric rise to fame is outlined as is her coming to terms with her "wholesome" image. I must admit bias, but it is good to read about the public and private life such a great star.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Julie Andrews/ An Intimate Biography
Comment: Good, straightforward biography. Made Ms. Andrews seem down to earth and pictured her as a hardworking and very loving wife and mother. I enjoyed seeing what was behind her dazzling talent.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Highly recommended
Comment: I really love this book. It is bright, charming and informative, and contains a very good overview of Dame Julie's career. My favourite chapters are those that detail her early years on the music hall stage in England, and also the discourse about her fall from grace in the late 1960s, when she found herself out of tempo with the times after the astonishing success of the previous decade.
The book is specific about dates, names and places, which I like, and has lots of details about the films Julie made or turned down, as well as a reflective look at her long-lasting marriage with Blake Edwards. I found it a thumping good read from beginning to end.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Just A Spoonful of Yawn
Comment: And I don't know if that's Ms Andrew's personality as portrayed in this book, or if the author was that bad of a writer.
Perhaps its a mixture of the two. Certainly, she doesn't come off well in this autobio. She married blah, treated her children like blah, treated her mother and father, siblings etc...like blah, and what we're left with at the end of the book is blah. The only magic Ms Andrews seems to have had was before the camera, and when she sang.
Anyway, it all added up to ... ta da .... blah.
I don't recommend it.
Customer Rating:
Summary: as a biography, it's an okay eighth-grade book report
Comment: An insightful biography -- uh, no. It's really more like a junior high book report, with any sources and semi-relevations culled from other sources than the author's own work. And I can't recall a straightforward biography where its author interjects himself into the process (e.g., "I" got to meet with Dame Julie here or there [usually with a cattle call of reporters, it seems]). The 80s, 90s, and new millennium years of Andrews get short work here, especially, most likely because there weren't other sources for the author to use. Stirling writes things like "'[fill in quote]' Julie snapped" to attempt to add some drama, but how does he know that Julie, indeed, snapped at someone?
It's a tv entertainment show rehash of Andrews' life, so at least for big fans, it offers some mild enjoyment. Let's hope that Julie herself covers these later years as a sequel to her "HOME" autobiography, as she's a real writer.
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