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Tue 28 April 2026 15:45, UK
Just because most actors would kill for a career half as successful as Julie Andrews, it doesn’t mean that the stage and screen legend hasn’t got a few painful regrets of her own.
Andrews could have played Joanna Lumley’s role in Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, but, in an ironic twist, given the movie’s subject matter, she was too out of her mind on painkillers following a recent surgery to board the veteran filmmaker’s tale of hedonism, capitalism, and debauchery.
The most famous case is undoubtedly My Fair Lady, with the star originating the part of Eliza Dolittle on Broadway in 1956 and playing it for three years, but when the time came to adapt the musical for the big screen, Audrey Hepburn was hired instead, and to add insult to injury, she didn’t even do her own singing.
However, there was a silver lining, because if Andrews had starred in George Cukor’s ‘Best Picture’-winning 1964 film, she wouldn’t have played the title character in Mary Poppins, which saw her claim a ‘Best Actress’ Oscar in her feature-length debut, which set the stage for the decades of success to come.
After Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music had made her one of Hollywood’s biggest female stars, and after a disappointing collaboration with Alfred Hitchcock on Torn Curtain, the opportunity arose for Andrews to make amends, when she was offered the chance to reprise one of her stage roles in cinema.
With echoes of My Fair Lady, she introduced Guenevere to the theatre-going audience in the early 1960s, earning a Tony nomination for Camelot. The difference the second time around was that when the production was given the silver screen treatment, hers was the first name on the casting wish list.
Despite never having a better chance to atone for the disappointment she felt when My Fair Lady went ahead without her, Andrews declined Joshua Logan’s 1967 film, and she’s regretted it ever since. “I was asked to do that movie,” she confirmed. “And, you know, I actually said no, and I’ll tell you why.”
“Because I had not gotten My Fair Lady, and I thought that somehow it would be a terrible comparison between the two in some way; I just thought it wouldn’t be a wise thing to do,” the seven-time Golden Globe winner explained. “I do not know why I said no, but I did.”
Clearly, being overlooked for My Fair Lady had a lasting impact, causing her to knock back Camelot several years later. In the end, Vanessa Redgrave played Guenevere, and Andrews has spent the last six decades ruing the day she rejected the movie, which became the second time in quick succession that one of her Broadway originals had been brought to cinemas and won widespread acclaim without her.
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