Julie Andrews, the Original Americanized Emily

Julie AndrewsMark writes:

One of my daily pleasures is listening to the Daily Mayo podcast from BBC Radio FiveLive. I download it each day onto my MP3 player and then play it through the car stereo on the way to work, alongside other BBC podcast favourites like the Today programme, 606: The Football Phone-in, Start the Week and In Our Time. This week's highlight on was, without question, Monday's Daily Mayo featuring an interview with Dame Julie Andrews, whose starring role in The Americanization of Emily (1964) gives Viola's blog its name. Here is the FiveLive blurb:

Dame Julie Andrews has reinvented herself as a writer, co-authoring 15 books with her daughter. Here she talks to Simon Mayo about her latest publication, "A Great American Mousical".

The interview focused mainly on this new book, "A Great American Mousical". Apparently she has written lots of children's books in "The Julie Andrews Collection" and she authors with her daughter. She also talked briefly, of course, about Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music but the parts of the interview that I enjoyed most were those where she reflected on living life as a British citizen in America.

Although she only occasionally returns to the UK for public engagements, she said that she often comes back secretly to see family and friends. When Simon Mayo pointed out how well she had kept her British accent, she added that she had adapted to certain Americanisms for convenience, and one can hear them now in her voice, e.g. I picked up one or two "t"s as "d"s which are very common in the US. I was delighted to hear that she still drinks a lot of tea, and has PG Tips and Marks and Sparks stuff sent over specially. We do something similar, though our British tea of choice is Yorkshire Tea. She brings marmite and marmalade back with her too, also like us, and she said that her husband Blake Edwards could not understand what she saw in the marmite, a common American reaction in our experience too. She said that she loved and missed England, and especially the Spring, but that she found Americans very friendly -- and they love the British. One of the nicest elements in the interview was her explaining that although she lived in America, she did not see it as turning her back on Britain. On the contrary, she saw herself as a representative of Britain.

You should be able to download and listen to the interview again for a several more days.