Since her professional singing debut at the London Hippodrome in 1947 - at the age of twelve - Julie Andrews has been a star. In the half century since those last days of British vaudeville, up through her smash Broadway comeback in Victor/Victoria, she has triumphed on stage, in the movies, and on television.

At thirteen, Julie gave a command performance for the Queen of England, at nineteen she became a Broadway star in The Boy Friend, and she became a theatrical legend before she was twenty-one, as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady.

By the time she was thirty-one, Julie was the best-paid and most beloved actress in the world, with an Academy Award for her first movie, Mary Poppins, and an international box-office championship with her third movie, The Sound of Music. Her remarkable body of work up to this point stamp her with an indelible image she came to resent: wholesome, innocent, the nanny next door.

Worse, at the peak of her enormous success, Andrews was unhappy enough to submit to daily psychotherapy. Her first marriage, to childhood sweetheart Tony Walton, broke up. After two flop movie musicals, Star! and Darling Lili, the press and public seemed to turn on her. Julie became box-office poison in Hollywood but even in her semiexile starred in critically successful, Emmy-winning television variety series, wrote two children's books, and performed live.

During this time, too, she concentrated on her growing family. Having become a superstar before she became her own person, Andrews made up for lost time at home.

When she did reemerge in movies in the 1980s, it was in sensationally different roles, many of them created by Blake Edwards, her husband of twenty-seven years. Julie played a "man" in the movie Victor/Victoria and mocked her own goody two-shoes image by literally baring her breasts in S.O.B. After That's Life, Duet for One, The Man Who Love Women, and A Fine Romance there was no going back to Mary Poppins.

In the 1990s she returned to concert tours and recordings, and finally to Broadway, in Victor/Victoria, thirty-three years after her last Broadway appearance, in Camelot. She also returned to controversy, refusing a nomination for an almost certain Tony Award to stand with the "egregiously overlooked" show's cast and creative crew, especially her writer-director husband.

Here at last is the whole sixty-two-year life story of Julie Andrews - her meteoric rise, her devastating fall, and her incredible comeback, from the little English girl with the freak four-octave, crystalline voice to the surprising legend who has outlasted her critics.