Julie Andrews was ‘condescending and mean’ and dubbed a ‘b**ch’ during early career
Hollywood icon Julie Andrews rubbed a number of her colleagues up the wrong way at the beginning of her career
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Actress Julie Andrews has played a number of butter wouldn't melt characters in her career.
But the Hollywood star has not always had the best comments made about her by her colleagues.
In 1956 the actress, 84, was cast in the original Broadway production of My Fair Lady opposite Rex Harrison.
Their relationship did not flourish during their stint treading the board together with Rex threatening to quit the production - that earned him a Tony Award and Julie a nomination - because of Julie.
Fuming with anger, the moment is recalled in Gerald Nachman's book Showstoppers!: The Surprising Backstage Stories of Broadway's Most Remarkable Songs.
Nachman pens that Rex told show bosses: "If that b**ch is here on Monday, I'm quitting the show."
His demands were not met and Julie continued in the role and Rex decided to stick around.
During rehearsals, director of the production Moss Hart apparently turned to his wife, the actress and singer Kitty Carlisle to vent about Andrews, it is also claimed in Nachman's nook.
He asked his wife about Julie: "Is she as bad as I think she is?"
Kitty is said to have replied: "She's worse."
And it was not just on stage where Julie rubbed up her fellow thespians the wrong way.
Christopher Plummer, her co-star in 1965 film The Sound Of Music, confessed to the media that "working with her was like getting hit over the head with a Valentine card".
And Richard Harris, her co-star in the film Hawaii, told his biographer Michael Feeney Callan that he had "rarely, if ever, experienced such hatred for a person" as he had felt towards Andrews.
"She was condescending and mean. I'm sure she saw how much I was enjoying myself, and I thought that annoyed her.
"She would say something, all quiet and conspiratorial, to the director, and I would shout "Did you say something, Jules?" which just p****d her."
Last year, Dame Julie - who won an Oscar for Best Actress in 1964 for her role in Mary Poppins - said she once felt she was not “worthy” of her astonishing success and even hid her Oscar.
She shared on struggling to accept her talent on an episode of The Graham Norton Show.
She said: “I kept the Oscar in the attic for a very long time because I thought I’d been given it as a ‘Welcome to Hollywood’ and I didn’t feel worthy of it.
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