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Less poetical, but no less rapturous, is Richard Burton, who starred with Julie in Camelot. Recently, a reporter brought the question to Burton:
How do you explain Julie?
"Don't know. Tell me what makes stars of two such dissimilar gents as R. Hudson and Eddie G. Robinson. She is among my three favorite costars, others being E. Taylor and P. O'Toole."
Is she insipid?
"On the contrary. Don't muck about with her—you'll see nature red in eye and tongue."
Intelligent?
"She is very intelligent, but not, I think, intellectual."
Peaches and cream? Curds and whey? Bubble and squeak?
"I don't know what she is, but she is very edible."
Her talents?
"Charm, intelligence, wit, mischief and very hard work. Friends of mine, mostly Americans, drool at the sound of her voice."
Her forte?
"Radiance, shafts of gold, bars of light—all that stuff. Every man I know who knows her is a little in love with her."
Guttural Guttersnipe. So are Julie's audiences, who have caught that one essential quality—her believability—that shines through every one of her important roles. Says Robert Wise, who directed her in The Sound of Music, "It can't be all just talent. A lot of talented people don't begin to make it the way she's made it. There is a genuineness about her, an unphoniness. She goes right through the camera onto film and out to the audience. Julie seems to have been born with that magic gene that comes through on the screen."
And on the stage. In that most believable of all musical comedies, My Fair Lady, Julie was an Eliza Doolittle that Shaw himself would have done heel clicks to see. Her progress from a guttural guttersnipe to lady of fashion was one of the most joyous stage transformations in memory. Night after night, her painfully halting and then triumphantly moving Rain in Spain number enthralled audiences and drenched the house with empathy. When she left the show, so did the fairest lady.
She literally floated into the movies on a cloud in Mary Poppins, gliding over the London skyline to become the nanny to a worm can of incorrigible kids. When she opened her carpetbag of tricks and proclaimed in a polysyllabic nonsense song that life was good and golden, neither the children on the screen nor the audience in the house had the slightest doubt that Julie Andrews was—well, supercalifragilisticex-pialidocious. So was the box office. Poppins was 1965's biggest-grossing picture, has earned $31 million.