Dame Julie Drops In

Dame Julie Drops In

Like Mary Poppins with her magical umbrella, the great Julie Andrews is dropping in for a series of one-night stands round Australia and New Zealand. And she’s bringing one of Captain Von Trapp’s sons with her. Ahead of he tour, Frank Hatherley spoke to Nicholas Hammond, the American born Aussie who learnt his most important show business lesson from Julie Andrews, whilst playing Frederich in the movie of The Sound of Music.

When Dame Julie presented an earlier version of An Evening with Julie Andrews in London some members of the audience complained that she wasn’t singing any songs. True fans, of course, knew about the botched throat operation in 1997 that had forever robbed her of her thrillingly pure singing voice.

The current management is taking no chance: the tour website is blunt. “Please note that Ms Andrews’ appearances feature a live ‘interview-style’ retrospective of her extraordinary career and does not feature live singing.”

Even so the prospects are mouth-watering. This is Dame Julie’s first-ever visit Down Under; she’s a fit and energetic 77 with an extraordinary 65 years of top-flight show biz history to talk about; and her ‘Special Guest Host’ will be Nicholas Hammond, the Australian actor/writer who, at the age of 13, played one of the Von Trapp children.

“It’s going to be fascinating,” Hammond tells me. “Shows like this can be incredibly effective - to have the real person there, integrating film clips from their work with narration and behind-the-scenes anecdotes.

 

 

“She’ll go into areas that are far more than simply ‘and then I did this film and then that play’. She talks in a holistic way about her whole life and the way she’s dealt with things both good and or challenging like the deaths of people she loved dearly or her own surgery. She’s quite frank about all that. Julie is the most astonishingly positive human being I’ve ever met.

“I can’t think of any other entertainer who, from the age of seven to the age of 77 has been on stage performing to full houses all that time, from English Music Hall with her performing parents, huge international film star, huge Broadway star, recording star, television star, all of her Disney films.”

He talks about the easily available YouTube clips of Julie as a pigtailed kid. “She was considered sort of a prodigy-stroke-freak. She had a range of four octaves when she was like eight years old. You can hear her singing opera at the age of 12. She could have had a brilliant career as an opera singer as well.”

Hammond had been among the 4000 child actors who auditioned for The Sound of Music in 1964. Born in Washington to an actress mother he had already been in a Broadway play, done some New York television and been one of the feral children in Peter Brooks’ startling movie version of Lord of the Flies.

What had been his first impression of Julie Andrews?

“She was extremely friendly and extremely professional. She was 27 years old. Poppins hadn’t come out yet, so no one on the crew knew who she was. She was just this English blow-in who they’d never heard of before. Yet she was there before anyone else in the morning, and she’d be there after everyone else had left, practicing the dance steps, practising the routines, practising the songs.

“We had almost three months of rehearsals before we started filming, but I never walked into a rehearsal when Julie wasn’t already in there, in her dance outfit, quietly working away on her own or with the choreographer. It was a wonderful example for kids to see. This is the way a real star behaves. They don’t throw tantrums, they don’t complain, they don’t keep people waiting, they just turn up, work their arse off, deliver the goods and go home with a smile on their face.

“It’s a lesson I’ve always remembered. The way you have the most fun on a film, or indeed on a play, is by being incredibly well prepared. The more prepared you are, and the more confident you are that you know your lines, you know what you’re doing, you know what happens next, then the more you can relax, let go of the tension and enjoy the experience. And that’s what Julie did.

“She taught us how to sing the entire score of Mary Poppins. We were all running around singing ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ when no one had heard of it before. And she’d tell us riddles and jokes and make funny faces – very, very clever because Julie knew that we all had to look like we absolutely adored her and she knew that, particularly with the little ones, they’re not going to be able to turn it on like a tap when the director says ‘action’. She created that environment all the time so that when we were in front of the camera it was just there naturally.”

After a successful career in US television — he was the first live-action Spider-Man on television from 1977-79 — Hammond came to Australia to play an American in the 1987 Channel 9 miniseries Cyclone Tracy. This led to him playing the American skipper of the yacht that lost The America’s Cup in an ABC miniseries, The Challenge. He met his partner, leading actress and former Artistic Director of the STC, Robyn Nevin, applied for citizenship and, simply, “I’ve been here ever since”.

Now 62, he still acts when a project takes his fancy, but has branched successfully into screenplay writing. He’s got three big projects currently on the go, including a film set in Shanghai for director Pauline Chan.

Does he ever feel that playing young Frederich Von Trapp had been something he was never allowed to forget?

“I was in Shanghai recently,” he says animatedly, “and I wanted to buy some DVDs of Chinese movies, just to see what they looked like. This department store occupied an entire city block. It was nine stories high, and the ninth story was nothing but DVDs and CDs, literally as far as the eye could see. And over in one corner was this enormous crowd of people. I thought ‘they must be giving something away’. So I went over and there was a big flat screen on the wall showing the Blu-ray of Sound of Music.

“I thought, well, here we are, 48 years later, in China, and all these people are standing there agog watching this film.

I feel incredibly lucky to have been a part of something that is so adored all over the world and which has brought so much happiness to so many people.

“You’d have to be pretty bloody churlish to have been in something that one and a half billion people have loved, and have told you your entire life how much they loved it and thank you for making it: it would take a particular type of misanthrope to have received that all your life and not be grateful and happy about it.”

An Evening with Julie Andrews plays Brisbane (May 18), Perth (May 21), Sydney (May 24 and 25), Adelaide (May 28), Melbourne (May 31) and Auckland (June 5).

Originally published in the May / June 2013 edition of Stage Whispers.

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