The best British movie from 1990s, according to Julie Andrews: “I’m very partial”
It was great to see Julie Andrews pop up last week out of nowhere, now 90 years of age but looking nothing like that and reminding us that even though she does occasional voiceovers for Bridgerton, she shouldn’t be forgotten as one of the most iconic British performers in history.
Doesn’t matter what you stack it up against, 1964’s Mary Poppins is one of the best films, of any genre, in all of cinema; Disney’s family classic being nominated for 13 Oscars and winning five, including one for Andrews herself as everyone’s favourite flying supernanny. She added a Golden Globe for ‘Best Actress’ to that Academy Award triumph, and the only question at the time was how on earth she would follow it.
What she did was make The Sound of Music the very next year, the near-three-hour-long musical drama about the von Trapp family that broke box office records all over the world, staying in cinemas for more than four years and eventually surpassing Gone With The Wind as the highest-grossing film of all time.
Once again, Andrews was handed a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar nomination and won another Golden Globe, and the cultural impact of those back-to-back films can’t be underestimated; even two years later, the Sound of Music soundtrack was swapping places with The Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band for the number one spot in the British charts. And the UK had arguably the biggest female star in the world thanks to Andrews.
For the next 60 years or so, she continued to work on both sides of the Atlantic, going from musicals to making Hitchcock films like Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and then going completely, controversially against type with 1981’s SOB from Breakfast at Tiffany’s director Blake Edwards.
Asked by The Guardian at the start of the 2000s about her own favourite British films, Andrews referenced some Ealing Comedies of the 1950s, in addition to the hit 1990s movie that starred Trainspotting’s Robert Carlyle, saying: “I love The Full Monty, which is about to be a musical, of course, down on Broadway. I’m very partial to some of the old British movies like [1951 Alec Guinness comedy] The Lavender Hill Mob, and I’m All Right Jack.”
Rather like Andrews’ own films in the mid-60s, The Full Monty was something of a musical movie sensation on its release, grossing an enormous £258million on a production budget of just $3.5m and told the story of six unemployed Sheffield steelworkers who decide to form a male striptease group. The stage show adaptation referenced by Andrews was also a huge success, and a play followed in 2013, with a TV series arriving in 2023.
Again, like Andrews’ classics, The Full Monty was also Academy Award-nominated, in four categories, but had the misfortune to come up against James Cameron’s historical behemoth, Titanic, which almost swept the boards at the 1998 ceremony. Despite that, the film did take home one statuette for ‘Best Original Musical or Comedy Score’.
In recent years, Andrews has focused on doing voiceovers and writing dozens of children’s books, but still managed to pick up an Emmy last year for her work on Netflix’s Bridgerton.
