Dame Julie Andrews just oozes class and sophistication, so it’s always delightful when she gets a little down and dirty, effectively playing against type for her entire public persona. And she was in rare form on “Ellen” as she shared a story about an “adorable” orgy.
Okay, full disclosure, it was totally a fake orgy for her 1979 film “10,” but it was nevertheless a large group of naked people. As Andrews tells it, her husband, the film’s director Blake Edwards, actually called her down to the set the day he was filming the sequence.
“He said, ‘Julie, you’ve just gotta come on over here, it’s an unbelievable sight,'” Andrews recalled. “So I went dashing over, of course I did.”
Absolutely, of course she did. Like anyone would not go down to see such a sight!
“What Blake had done was hire an awful lot of people who really are very at ease doing orgy films, I guess,” Andrews continued, laughing at the remembrance of a room filled with totally nude people “lying around very happily and casually, treating it normally.”
Even better for Andrews was the sight of her co-star in the film, Dudley Moore, standing in the middle of all that flesh. “And you know, he wasn’t very, very tall,” Andrews said of Moore. “And Blake put him between two enormously statuesque ladies.”
She then did a quick visual comparison of where the women’s “bums” were and where “little Dudley’s” was, notably lower to the ground. Moore often played his 5’3″ height for laughs in his film roles, and Edwards clearly was doing so again here.
Describing the whole scene as “sweet,” Andrews said, “It was more adorable than anything else because Dudley was so adorable.”
Taking on a more serious tone, when DeGeneres asked her what the most difficult part of her life has been, Andrews finally confessed that it was the loss of her singing voice. She underwent surgery for throat nodules in 1997 only to subsequently find out she had no nodules at all and the botched surgery had permanently damanged her singing voice, and even altered her speaking tone.
A huge part of her identity both personally and professionally — she was performing on Broadway when she underwent the surgery — Andrews understandably struggled emotionally with this for years afterward. But it was a new passion and something her daughter said that would change everything.
While in the depths of her struggle, she said, “I thought I’m going to go crazy if I don’t do something. And that’s actually when I began really writing with my daughter.”
The two would go on to write approximately 30 books together, and it would prove to be just the outlet she needed to express herself. And it was her daughter who put it all into perspective for her.
“She suddenly said to me one day, simply, ‘Mom, you’ve just found a new way of using your voice,'” Andews said. “And the weight just fell off my shoulders and it’s been fine ever since.”
In fact, Andrews collaborated with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton on the book she’s currently promoting, a candid autobiography of her life entitled, “Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years.”
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