Julie Andrews, is an amazing 90 today – ‘crisply accented, sweetly tuneful and girlish in her most famous movie musicals, but always with a sense of humour about her angelic image.’
She won the 1965 Oscar for playing a “practically perfect” English nanny for Walt Disney and mischievously drove around Los Angeles with a “Mary Poppins Was a Junkie” bumper sticker on her car. Her Hollywood nickname was “the nun with the switchblade”.
Forever associated with The Sound of Music, her childhood during the London blitz was when her extraordinary vocal talent was discovered. At the age of eight, she had an adult larynx, and a clear soprano voice with a four-octave range. She started out in music hall, and did the Royal Variety Performance aged 13, and ended up on Broadway while still a teenager, in The Boy Friend and then in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady.
Her second husband director Blake Edwards, expanded her range in movies in the 1970s in The Tamarind Seed, a romantic spy thriller and 10, a sex comedy with Dudley Moore; thence onto Victor/Victoria, a queer musical farce about a singer who masquerades as a man.
In 1997, botched surgery on her vocal cords more or less ended Andrews’ singing voice and she would rarely sing on screen again. Though indefatigable as ever she starred in The Princess Diaries with voiceovers for the Shrek and Despicable Me films. Most recently she has narrated Netflix’s raunchy regency drama Bridgerton – ‘every consonant of Lady Whistledown’s wicked whispers impeccably articulated.’
Born 1 October 1935, 6 am Walton-on-Thames England (biography) She is not surprisingly an ice-cool Sun Libra with a hard-working and heavily aspected creative Venus in Virgo conjunct Neptune, sextile Mercury in Scorpio, square Mars, opposition Saturn and trine Uranus. Her Jupiter (Moon) in Scorpio trine Pluto will give her confidence and attract success while her Mars in Sagittarius in her communicative 3rd will give her clarity and strength in projecting her voice.
She also has two yods of Uranus sextile Saturn inconjunct Sun and Sun sextile Mars inconjunct Uranus which would out her on a singular path in life though not without the need for adjustments in how she directed her will and her zanier streak. A definite one off.
When a botched throat operation in 1997 damaged her vocal chords, for which she sued the hospital – tr Pluto was square her 6th house Saturn putting immense pressure on her health, with ensuing depression; her Solar Arc Sun was approaching the conjunct in to her 3rd house Mars for a shocking event; tr Neptune was square her Mercury, undermining her voice. And her Progressed Mars was in a dead-halt, enraging, frustrated opposition to her Pluto as was tr Neptune for a devastating time.
Mary Poppins made me want to be a nanny after seeing the film as a child. Of course that didn’t last. But that film and The Sound of Music made me a life long fan.
Is that actually a yod with Uranus at the point? The Mars base seems too many degrees-wide.
Dame Julie Andrews is my favorite living birthday twin now that my grandmother and Jimmy Carter are gone. I loved musicals growing up, both watching and singing, even though about studying musical theater before my inner critic (Virgo Mercury trine Capricorn Moon) became too loud partly because of Dame Julie. But nobody can take away the joy of singing those tunes in shower or watching and listening her flawless, both vocally and in style, performances.
Professionally speaking, I notice her Taurus Uranus trine Virgo Venus. Natural singers – Dame Julie was a prodigy – tend to have a Uranus/Venus connection. 1st house Sun would give a stage presence. I also notice the Virgo Rising / Sun Libra combination we share – it tends to give a “clean” look even when people have challenging Moon or/and Venus position, even Scorpio.