So, Julie Andrews is 90. Is Julie Andrews still alive? Yeah, she is, and the internet is currently flooding with tributes to the magical nanny and the singing nun. Everyone’s posting clips from Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music. It’s a whole festival of saccharine nostalgia.

And I get it. But it’s the wrong story.

The real story, the one that actually matters, is summed up by a bumper sticker she used to have on her car in LA: "Mary Poppins Was a Junkie."

That’s it. That’s the whole ballgame. The woman who became the global icon of crisp, clean, "wholesome" perfection spent her entire career trying to tell us it was all an act. A beautifully constructed, Oscar-winning, money-printing cage. And we never really wanted to listen.

The Making of a Brand, The Unmaking of a Person

The Golden Cage

Let’s be real. The whole Julie Andrews origin story is a perfect piece of Hollywood mythology. She gets her start as a kid with a freakish four-octave voice singing for her neighbors during the London Blitz. She becomes a Broadway superstar in My Fair Lady. Then, in a move that defines her career, studio head Jack Warner snubs her for the movie version, famously casting the non-singing Audrey Hepburn instead.

So what happens? Disney scoops her up for Mary Poppins. She wins the Oscar and, in the coldest dish of revenge ever served, thanks Jack Warner on stage for making it all possible. A year later, The Sound of Music makes her the biggest star on the planet.

It’s a fantastic story. It’s also the moment she was sealed in amber. She became a brand. The Julie Andrews brand was spoonfuls of sugar, crisp English diction, and unimpeachable moral goodness. Her nickname in the industry was "the nun with the switchblade," which tells you everything you need to know about the gap between the person and the persona.

A Masterclass in Setting Your Own Career on Fire

The Escape Plan

Once you're trapped in that cage, what do you do? You start rattling the bars. Hard.

Her rebellion wasn’t subtle. Right between Poppins and Music, she made The Americanization of Emily, a movie with zero songs where she has steamy love scenes and slaps James Garner in the face. It was a warning shot.

But the real fireworks started when she teamed up with her second husband, director Blake Edwards. They went on a decade-long mission to systematically dismantle her image. They made 10, a straight-up sex comedy. Then came S.O.B., a brutal satire of Hollywood where she plays an actress famous for her squeaky-clean image who, in the film’s climax, goes topless to try and save a movie. Get it? It wasn't exactly a coded message.

The masterpiece of this era, though, was Victor/Victoria. A queer musical farce about a female singer who finds fame by pretending to be a male drag queen. Andrews in drag is... well, she’s fantastic. It was a hit, a cult classic, and a massive middle finger to anyone who still thought of her as Maria von Trapp. This wasn't an actress "showing her range." This was a calculated act of creative arson against her own brand.

You think any celebrity would do that now? Today's stars have their images so curated by PR teams that their idea of being "edgy" is admitting they sometimes drink oat milk. It's pathetic. The guts it took to do what she did, to risk the brand that made her a fortune, is just from another universe entirely.

When Art Becomes a Horrifying Rehearsal

The Cosmic Punchline

And then it gets dark. Really dark.

In the mid-80s, she made two dramas that, in hindsight, feel like a horrifying premonition. In That's Life!, she plays a singer terrified she has throat cancer. A couple years later, in Duet for One, she plays a world-famous concert violinist whose career is destroyed by an MS diagnosis. Her character has a complete breakdown and, as she bluntly tells her therapist, starts "fucking a totter!"

It's brutal stuff. And then, in 1997, life delivered a punchline crueler than any screenwriter could have written. A botched surgery on her vocal cords. The Julie Andrews voice, arguably the most famous and technically perfect singing voice of the 20th century, was just… gone. Destroyed.

The irony is so thick it's suffocating. The woman who played a singer losing her voice, lost her voice. It's a tragedy. No, 'tragedy' doesn't cover it—it's a piece of cosmic malice. The universe decided to play the blackest of comedies, and she was the star. And for the longest time, it seemed like that was the end of the story, and honestly...

How a Spoonful of Sugar Became High-Society Smut

The Last Laugh is the Sharpest

But it wasn't the end. Because the nun with the switchblade is definately a survivor.

After losing her singing voice, she pivoted. She became a literal queen for a new generation in The Princess Diaries. It was a smart, savvy move, playing on her regal image while also being funny as hell. She did voice work in kids' movies like Shrek and Despicable Me.

But the final, most perfect act of subversion is happening right now. That voice. The one that sang "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." The one that taught the von Trapp children how to sing "Do-Re-Mi." That same voice, with every one of its impeccably pronounced consonants, is Lady Whistledown on Netflix's raunchy, horny Regency drama Bridgerton.

Think about that. The voice of our collective childhood innocence is now narrating high-society smut. She ain't singing about raindrops on roses anymore. She’s whispering about which duke is sleeping with which debutante. It's the most brilliant, subtle, and hilarious victory lap I’ve ever seen. She won. She finally, completely, escaped the cage, and she did it by using the one thing they could never take from her: the sound of her voice.

She Finally Broke the Doll ###

In the end, everyone who tried to keep her in that "practically perfect" box lost. She spent 60 years chipping away at the porcelain doll image they built for her, and when it finally shattered, she just picked up the sharpest pieces and kept on fighting. You have to respect that.

Reference article source：

• Julie Andrews at 90: the magical nanny with a sideline in the sly, sexy and subversive
• Julie Andrews at 90: Her five best films and the stories behind them