Across an extraordinary career spanning more than seven decades, Julie Andrews has managed to become one of the most beloved actresses in the history of cinema. Her role as Mary Poppins earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress, and to this day we still know by heart Mary’s songs in Mary Poppins, another of the films that cemented her as a cinema legend. Today, at 91 years old, she continues to face life with enviable energy.
The actress, born in the English town of Walton-on-Thames on October 1, 1935, has never claimed to have a secret formula for not aging, but her approach to life is surprisingly simple: stay active, keep curiosity alive, and keep learning. For Julie Andrews, exercise has been a part of her routine for much of her life.
Despite entering her ninth decade, she has continued to prioritize movement, adapting her workouts to the changes in her body. Ballet, stretching, yoga, walking, and aerobic exercises have been part of her routine at different moments in her life. But she has not neglected keeping her mind sharp as well.
In a recent appearance on Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s Wiser Than Me podcast, she was asked what age she truly felt. “Honestly, I feel like I’m 50, I swear to God. As long as the brain keeps functioning well, everything is fine,” Julie Andrews replied before adding that “now I don’t feel bad at all.” That said, the actress acknowledged that “growing older can sometimes be a nuisance”, and she would like “to do more things, more exercise and all that”.
Julie Andrews and Her Semi-Retirement
The British actress no longer sings on the Alpine slopes nor strolls the rooftops of London with the chimney sweeps. But her voice and what she has represented throughout these decades endure. That voice which nearly disappeared in 1997 due to a failed surgery to remove nodules has, in these years, turned toward voice acting.
Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins.
While gradually stepping away from the screen, Julie Andrews adapted and lent her distinctive voice to characters such as Queen Lillian in the Shrek films, the funny and wicked mother of Gru in the animated Despicable Me saga, and, more recently, the mysterious Lady Whistledown in Bridgerton, a series for which she won two Emmy Awards.
Beyond cinema, the flying nanny fought to adopt two babies from Vietnam just after Saigon fell, helping raise awareness about the need for adoptive parents. She later co-founded the charity Operation USA and launched the Japanese delegation of the United Nations Development Fund for Women. She also supported UNICEF after the devastating cyclone that struck present-day Bangladesh in 1970 and traveled to Jordan and Senegal to support initiatives for women and children.
She Won’t Be Appearing in The Princess Diaries
While fans await the sequel to the Princess Diaries saga starring Anne Hathaway, Julie Andrews has confirmed that she will not participate in the third installment. In an interview with InStyle magazine, the veteran actress explained that she had declined the opportunity to appear in the role of Queen Clarisse Renaldi.
Andrews and Hathaway were 65 and 17 years old when the original film was released.
“I think ‘I’ve retired’ would actually be the best way to describe it,” the actress said last year. “The film crew kept asking me for a long time whether I would be willing to do it. It was very hard for me to say ‘no’, but I did it because I felt I had already enjoyed a wonderful experience, and I felt this installment would be very successful and that the grandma wouldn’t need to be in it at my age.”
The original film, based on Meg Cabot’s novel, premiered in 2001 with Julie Andrews and a young Anne Hathaway portraying the Queen of Genovia and her granddaughter, Mia Thermopolis, respectively. It became a box-office hit, and in 2004 a sequel was released that also enjoyed great reception. The third installment has already been confirmed and will be directed by Adele Lim, but it does not yet have a release date.
