When Julie Andrews went topless to change her image: “I hardly thought about it”
When you think about Julie Andrews, you will probably think about one of two things – either a plucky young nanny grasping an umbrella or a carefree nun twirling in an Alpine meadow. Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music were unprecedented successes when they came out, both for Andrews and for Hollywood itself. They made her a top box office star and an Oscar winner, and made the industry hurtle into a frenzy of musical-making, trying to strike gold with the same formula.
For Andrews, however, being typecast as the prim and proper Brit with a cut-glass accent and note-perfect singing voice had its disadvantages. She was almost never allowed to be any other type of character, and although she has always maintained a relentlessly gracious attitude about her career, it’s reasonable to assume that when her husband, Blake Edwards, approached her with a daring proposition, she was intrigued.
The film was S.O.B., an eviscerating satire of Hollywood that made studios so nervous it took Edwards six years to finance it. When it finally got off the ground in 1981, Edwards had been churning out hits for more than two decades, including Breakfast at Tiffany’s and the original Pink Panther movies with Peter Sellers. His goal was to do a Hollywood hit job, and he wanted Andrews to play a version of herself.
S.O.B. Richard Mulligan as Felix Farmer, a bigshot producer who tries extremely hard to kill himself after he suffers his first box office failure. Witnessing a young couple sneaking off to have sex in his Malibu home during one of his unsuccessful suicide attempts, he decides that his new movie, Night Wind, needs to be turned into a softcore porno. The only trouble is that it stars his wife, Sally Miles (Andrews), an actress and singer most famous for her Oscar-winning performance in Peter Pan. Night Wind was originally meant to be a G-rated children’s musical, but Felix overhauls it and informs Sally that she will now rip open her dress in one of her musical numbers to reveal her bare breasts.
In her 2019 memoir, Home Work, Andrews remembered that she was nervous about the scene but had six years to come to terms with it and believed that it was character and plot-driven. Edwards promised to shoot it on a closed set, which added to her level of comfort, but they had a disagreement about the amount of skin that would be involved.
Andrews recalled the first fitting of the red gown that would be ripped away in the scene and her trial run of the moment itself. “I screwed up my courage and ripped open the breakaway top, which was intended to reveal just one breast,” she wrote. “Blake waved his hands in front of his face as if erasing chalk from a blackboard. ‘No, no, no,’ declared. ‘It won’t do. It has to be both boobs […] Sorry honey, but it really doesn’t work otherwise.’”
After some convincing, she relented. By the time they shot the scene, Andrews insisted that they had “rehearsed so much that I hardly thought about it.” In the film, Sally wins the Oscar for her out-of-character role. Sadly, Andrews did not.
