August 27 - Mary Poppins

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On this day, in 1964, Mary Poppins had its world debut at a star-studded gala at Grauman's Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, California. Walt Disney first became aware of the strict English nanny named Mary Poppins through his two daughters, Diane and Sharon. The girls, about five and three at the time, loved to hear the stories about the Banks children and their adventures with Mary. They even got their father to promise to make a movie about them. So, in 1938, Walt contacted the author of the series, Pamela Lyndon Travers, to buy the rights. Since Travers absolutely abhorred cartoons, and that was all Disney was known for at the time, she sent back an emphatic no. If she thought that would deter Walt from delivering on a promise he made to his daughters, she was thoroughly unprepared for the drama that played out over the next 26 years.

For most of the two decades that Walt tried to convince Travers to sell him the rights to Poppins, things remained pretty low key. He’d ask, she’d say no. He’d ask again, she’d say no again. But as the Disney studio moved into live action pictures and television production, it became increasingly important to Walt that he do a movie based on Travers’ books. It also became increasingly clear that getting Travers to agree to an arrangement was going to be very difficult. Walt was a persistent man when it came to getting what he wanted. Travers was a persistent woman in getting what she wanted. The rock met the hard place and it became a game to see who was going to be ground down first.

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Walt started a full court press on Travers as the Fifties came to an end. He was confident that he could win her over, but he also hedged his bets by developing a similar movie based on books by another English author, Mary Norton, which eventually became Bedknobs and Broomsticks. When he was in England overseeing studio projects being filmed there, he even went so far as to visit Travers at her London home to try to persuade her in person. If Travers hadn’t needed an influx of cash (it had been a while since the Poppins books had been widely popular), she might never have caved in to his requests. In 1961, when the rock could sense that the hard place was ready to crumble, Walt flew Travers to Los Angeles, first class, to sign the papers. She insisted that she have script approval rights. Since Walt, who was clearly more knowledgeable about how movies were made, knew that those rights didn’t amount to much (and that his contractual rights to final print approval trumped them), he agreed. If he’d known the headaches she would give him over the next few months, he might have changed his mind.

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As part of her script approval rights, Travers inserted herself into the pre-production process as intimately and as forcefully as she could. She objected to almost everything that had “been done” to her characters. Mary was too sweet. The colors of the set were all wrong. The Sherman Brothers songs with their nonsense words in them were dreadful. And don’t even get her started on the planned animated sequence or the fact that they’d hired that hack, Dick Van Dyke, in a starring role. There are actual recordings of the planning sessions that Travers was present for and you can clearly hear a woman with severe seller’s remorse in them. Walt may have been patronizingly indulgent of her complaints at the beginning, but by the time she was safely on a plane back to London, he didn’t care if he ever saw her again. He would not be able to make that dream come true.

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Once the script was finalized, actual production began in earnest on Mary Poppins. The stories surrounding that process are enough to fill a book or make an entirely different movie about. There’s the fact that Julie Andrews was only available to do the film because Warner Brother’s declined to cast her in a role she’d originated on Broadway, Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. When awards time rolled around, Julie beat that pictures star, Audrey Hepburn, for the Golden Globe and won the Oscar (which Audrey wasn’t even nominated for). Julie was also three months pregnant when she was offered Mary Poppins, but Walt was so sure of her casting he said production would wait till after the baby was born. Walt was also sure, in spite of Travers’ opinion, of casting Dick Van Dyke as Bert the Chimney Sweep. He was less than enthused about letting Dick play Mr. Dawes Sr., the eldest banker who laughs himself to death. Not only did Dick have to do extensive screen tests in order to secure that role, but he had to make a generous contribution to CalArts as well. His endearingly terrible cockney accent as Bert can only be partially blamed on him as no one bothered to critique it during filming. He has since formerly apologized to Britain and Britain said no worries, they found his accent to be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious (which I can’t quite figure out of that’s a compliment or not).

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All the special effects tricks the studio had learned up to that point were used in Mary Poppins and some new ones showed up as well. The Imagineers were hard at work developing Audio Animatronics for The Enchanted Tiki Room and the 1964 World’s Fair. They also devised the robin that sits on Mary’s finger during A Spoonful of Sugar, except that didn’t go quite as well as planned. There wasn’t enough insulation in the robin’s feet as Julie kept getting fairly painful shocks from the bird (which in turn caused the actress’s famously foul mouth to fire). Luckily that was a short scene that in the end was highly effective.

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It’s impossible to talk about Mary Poppins without mentioning the music. Some of the best work the Sherman Brothers ever did is immortalized in the film, along with tales of several songs that could have been. Richard and Robert wrote a ballad for Mary that they were extremely proud of, The Eyes of Love, that Julie felt wasn’t quite right. Walt agreed and the prized song was cut. The brothers struggled to come up with another song until one of their sons described getting his polio vaccine via a sugar cube and the fantastic A Spoonful of Sugar was born. They wrote a solid version of Let’s Go Fly a Kite that Walt said was great to end a Broadway musical but would never end his movie. Rewritten as a waltz, Kite has become another classic tune. Several songs that were written for Poppins but not used found new life in other Disney projects. West Wind popped up in Big Red, The Right Side became an anthem in the Disney Channel series The House on Pooh Corner and The Beautiful Briny enlivened Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

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And then there’s the song that reportedly became one of Walt’s favorites for the remainder of his life, Feed the Birds. Used to frame the serious moments in the film, Birds became the central theme of Mary Poppins: the fact that Mary comes to teach the children, and through them their father, the lessons of charity and kindness and how it doesn’t take much to render either. Quite often, at the end of a work week, Walt would invite Richard and Robert to his office, ask them how the various projects they were working on were fairing and then drift to the window and quietly say “Play it.” The brothers knew what he wanted and would play Feed the Birds while Walt stared out on a landscape that only he could see. Reportedly, when Richard played Birds as the last song during his mini concert at the dedication of the Partners statue in Disneyland, a single bird dropped from seemingly nowhere, circled the piano and flew back into the clouds. You can’t prove either way whether that was Walt saying hello to his old friend or not, but Richard isn’t the only one who believes.

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As production on Mary Poppins wrapped up and the gala premiere loomed, there was one very conspicuous invitation to it that seemed to have been lost in the mail. The story goes that Walt felt it was fine to invite PL Travers to the London debut, but that she didn’t need to fly all the way to Hollywood for the extravaganza at Grauman’s. Travers disagreed and, much to Walt’s consternation, guilted someone at the studio into letting her come. Thankfully someone warned him of her arrival well before hand and he was able to grit his teeth and smile for the cameras as he escorted her into the theater.

All the Hollywood elite were there for the inaugural screening and everyone loved it. Mary Poppins was almost immediately declared to be Walt’s magnum opus. It enjoyed universal critical acclaim and became the most profitable movie of the year, grossing over $31 million on a $4.4 million budget. The buckets of money reaped from Poppins wouldn’t stay in the studio’s bank account for long, however. A large chunk of it went towards buying a bunch of swamp land in central Florida. When Oscar time rolled around, Poppins not only snapped up Best Actress, but nabbed two statues for its music and two more for visual effects and editing. It was nominated for Best Picture but lost, somewhat ironically, to My Fair Lady.

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In the decades since its release Mary Poppins has enchanted legions of new fans and shows no signs of shedding any of its appeal. Although it isn’t quite truthful to say that everyone initially loved it. At the party after the premiere, PL Travers marched up to Walt and demanded that the animated sequence be removed. Walt stared at her for a beat, said “Pamela, the ship has sailed” and walked away. Travers never authorized another film version of her nanny but by 1977 had apparently come to terms with the wild popularity of the Disney take on it. In an interview that year she admitted she’d seen it a couple of times and while it wasn’t anything like her books, it was a good, maybe even a glamorous, film in its own right. I think the word she was looking for was “great” but I otherwise couldn’t agree with her more.

June 3 - Wally Boag and Betty Taylor

On this day, in 2011, Wallace Vincent Boag passed away in Santa Monica, California. Born on September 13, 1920 in Portland, Oregon, Wally was a professional dancer by the age of nine. By the time he was 16, he ran his own dance school. When he turned 19, Wally added comedy to his resume and his career was off and running. Like many performers of the time, he became part of the vaudeville circuit, honing his act on the tough crowds of Poughkeepsie and other Peoria. But Wally had that certain something that tends to be elusive in show business (I like to call it talent) and he not only played the smaller venues of America but he was invited to places like Radio City Music Hall in New York City and the Palladium in London, England. During a show at the London Hippodrome, Starlight Roof, he brought a 12 year old girl onstage to assist with his balloon act. Part of the act involved a little singing and the young lady’s voice wowed the audience so much she became a regular part of the show (her name, by the way, was Julie Andrews).

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In 1945, Wally’s talents brought him to the attention of Messrs. Metro, Goldwyn and Mayer. They offered him a contract and he began a brief career in movies. He appeared in exactly two for MGM and went uncredited in both: as a soldier in Without Love with Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and as a Canadian flier in Thrill of a Romance with Esther Williams. While his turn on the Silver Screen didn’t exactly pan out, Wally didn’t stop performing. He continued to appear on stages across America and around the world. In the early Fifties, Wally was in a musical revue in Australia when he met a tenor by the name of Donald Novis. A couple of years later, Donald convinced Walt Disney to give Wally an audition for a new show that was being developed for his soon to be open theme park. Walt loved him and that’s how Wally signed a two week contract to open The Golden Horseshoe Revue at the Golden Horseshoe Saloon in Frontierland of Disneyland.

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I think it’s probably unnecessary to say that Wally’s Horseshoe contract was renewed and for a little bit longer than just two weeks at a time. Wally’s character of a travelling salesman eventually morphed into Pecos Bill which he would perform three times a day. Over the course of the next 27 years, Wally logged almost 40,000 performances. His routines included songs, dancing, the ability to spit out a seemingly endless amount of teeth, rapid fire jokes and balloon creations he called Boagaloons. In 1963, he was joined onstage by an old co-star, Julie Andrews, for a press event for Mary Poppins. The duo recreated their first meeting by singing By the Light of the Silvery Moon together.

In 1971, Wally travelled to Central Florida to help get the Diamond Horseshoe Saloon up and running for the opening of the Magic Kingdom. He spent three years performing Pecos Bill for Walt Disney World guests before returning to California to finish out his career. He finally retired in 1982, quipping that before his contract with Disney, the longest he’d ever worked a gig was 54 weeks, who knew two weeks was going to last so long?

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In the Sixties, while Walt was still alive, Wally also did a handful of other projects for the company. He had small roles in The Absent Minded Professor (as a television newsman), Son of Flubber (the father in a television commercial) and The Love Bug (a flabbergasted driver). His second biggest contribution to Disneyana (yet, ironically, his longest lasting) is as the voice of Jose in The Enchanted Tiki Room, for which he also wrote a big chunk of the script. Walt was reportedly considering Wally for the voice of Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh shorts, but the role ultimately went to Paul Winchell. After Walt’s death, with his biggest cheerleader no longer championing him, Wally’s involvement outside of the Saloon dried up. Until 1981, that is, when he was the special guest star on an episode of The Muppet Show, bringing bits from his Pecos Bill persona to a worldwide audience.

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In 1995, Wally was declared an official Disney Legend for his decades of thrilling audiences in the Horseshoe Saloons and leading the show in the Tiki Room. As a deeper honor, he also received his own window on Main Street USA in Disneyland that reads “Theatrical Agency – Golden Vaudeville Routines – Wally Boag, Prop.” In 2009, he published his autobiography, Wally Boag, Clown Prince of Disneyland and lived out the rest of his life in Santa Monica with Ellen, his wife of 68 years, until he succumbed to Alzheimer’s in June of 2011. He was 90.

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Coincidentally, on June 4, 2011, the day after Wally died, his longtime costar at the Diamond Horseshoe Revue, Betty Taylor, also passed away in Coupesville, Washington. Born in Seattle, Washington on October 7, 1919, Betty began her professional singing career at the age of 12. Over the first twenty four years of her career, she shared the stage with folks like Les Brown, Red Nichols and Frank Sinatra. In 1956, a year after the Golden Horseshoe Revue opened, it became necessary to recast the Saloon’s feisty female proprietor (and Pecos Bill’s sweetheart), Sluefoot Sue. Betty auditioned for and got a four week contract to play the character (twice as long as Wally’s); she spent the next thirty years working through it.

One of the highlights of Betty’s years with the Golden Horseshoe came in the mid Sixties. Walt had decided to mark the 10,000 performance of the Revue as an episode of The Wonderful World of Color and asked Betty to not only play Sue but to emcee the program as well. She initially demurred but Walt insisted and the episode remains one of the classics. Betty remained with the Revue all the way until it closed on October 12, 1986, making her the longest continuous cast member (beating out Wally by a little more than three years) and logging in over 45,000 performances. She was declared an official Disney Legend right along with her perennial beau in 1995. She continued to enjoy singing for the rest of her days and would frequently serenade visitors, even after she moved into a nursing home. When her last note finally faded away, she was 91.

January 19 - Adriana Caselotti

On this day, in 1997, Adriana Caselotti passed away in Los Angeles, California. She was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on May 16, 1916 as the second daughter in a family of musical Italian immigrants. Her father, Guido, was a vocal coach and her mother, Maria, sang with the Royal Opera Theatre of Rome. Even her older sister, Louise, would one day sing opera and give voice lessons. When Adriana was seven, her family returned to Italy so her mother could tour with an opera company. While there, she received her education at the convent of San Getulio near Rome. When the family returned to the States in 1926, her three year Italian adventure had been so immersive, she actually had to relearn English. Now located in Southern California, Adriana studied singing under her father and by 1935 was starting to appear in MGM films as a chorus girl. Then her father got a phone call that changed everything.

As production started gearing up on Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs over at the Walt Disney Studio, the time came to hire voice actors. Knowing just how important the right voice was going to be in selling this picture to the audience, the company casting scout started calling local voice coaches, looking for leads on great voices. Guido Caselotti had gained a healthy reputation in the years since settling in Los Angeles and was near the top of the list. When Guido answered the phone, Adriana snuck into the other room and listened in on the conversation with the extension phone (those of you who've never experienced a land line before won't understand the gleeful deviousness of doing that). As the talk turned to any voices Guido might be able to recommend,  Adriana immediately piped up with an impromptu audition. Apparently it was good enough to get her an official one.

As the story goes, Walt would sit behind a screen while listening to the actors who came to try out for a role so he wouldn't be influenced by how they looked, not something terribly important in animation. Afterwards, Walt would like to say that when he heard Adriana sing, he was pretty sure he was listening to Snow White. Whether or not that was true, over 150 other women were given a shot before the role was offered to her at the ripe old age of 19. She was paid about $20 each day she came in to record dialogue and songs. After 48 days of working her magic in front of the microphone, she made a total of $970, the equivalent of $17,000 today.

Adriana always maintained that she had no real idea of what she was working on. She knew it was going to be longer than the usual cartoon short but was only thinking it would be twenty minutes max. It didn't really sink in until the film's gala premiere when, surrounded by Hollywood stars, the story took over an hour and twenty minutes to tell. A lot of people like to say something about the fact that Adriana never got a credit for providing the voice of the original Disney princess, but it's not like she was singled out to be slighted. No one received voice credit in a Disney film until the mid-Forties. What's less clear is whether or not Adriana's subsequent career was deliberately squashed by the studio or not.

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Shortly after Snow White hit the silver screen, Jack Benny reputedly wanted Adriana to appear on his radio show. When he asked Walt about it, Walt said no, he couldn't allow the illusion of Snow White to be spoiled. She would later be involved in a law suit against the studio, alleging she was owed part of the profits for the songs she recorded that were released as records. The case was dismissed. Adriana would only have two more roles in film following Snow White. In the Tin Man's song in The Wizard of Oz, she sang the part of Juliet, specifically doing the line "Wherefore art thou Romeo?". Then, in It's a Wonderful Life, she can be heard singing in Martini's bar while Jimmy Stewart is praying. And that was it. She tried to get an opera career going at one point but nothing ever came of it.

Now, was Adriana's complete lack of a career because her voice was too recognizable as Snow White's or was it because mean Uncle Walt wouldn't let her have one? Arguments could probably be made for both sides, but considering Adriana herself never (publicly at least) complained about her treatment from Disney (in spite of the lawsuit) and she continued to have an amiable relationship with the studio for years to come, I'd have to say it just wasn't in the cards for her. She would do plenty of publicity for Disney over the years, frequently wearing a familiar blue and yellow dress and gamely singing "I'm wishing." In 1972, she went on a Thanksgiving Day episode of The Julie Andrews Hour and sang a couple of duets from Snow White with Julie and later was a guest on The Mike Douglas Show as well.

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In 1992, when Disneyland was refurbishing their Snow White Grotto, Adriana stepped into the recording studio once more to make a new track of "I'm Wishing" for the wishing well. Even though she was 75 at the time, she still sounded the same. I remember seeing an interview with her once (probably from around that time) where she said the reason she could still sound like everyone expected her to after almost six decades was because she had always done Snow White in a falsetto. Whatever the reason, it worked (even if she kind of didn't). But, hey, if you can only ever have one role in your acting career, you can't do much better than the first Princess. Speaking of firsts, Adriana was made an official Disney Legend in 1994 (not even posthumously, for once) and was the first woman voice actor to receive the honor. And if that doesn't make you Happy, you must be Dopey.

October 7 - Bedknobs and Broomsticks

On this day, in 1971, Bedknobs and Broomsticks made its world debut in London, England. Based on two books by British author Mary Norton, some have called Bedknobs little more than Mary Poppins' less talented cousin. In my opinion, that is a totally unfair assessment. As far as the talented part goes. Otherwise it absolutely is Mary's cousin.

The similarities between the two films run deep. In fact, Bedknobs had started production a decade earlier when Walt was having trouble getting the rights to Poppins. Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi co-wrote both scripts. David Tomlinson appears in both. Both movies utilize a mix of animation and live-action. The Sherman Brothers wrote songs for both. And a certain lead actress was wanted for both.

After Poppins, and Walt's death, the Bedknobs project kept getting put on the production schedule, it was a project Walt himself had started after all, and then getting taken back off the production schedule, mainly because executives felt it was too similar to the earlier film. Bill Walsh kept developing it anyways and, when he finally got the green light in 1969, offered the role of Eglantine Price to Julie Andrews. Julie hesitated. By the time she called Bill back about it, he'd already moved on, offered the role to Angela Lansbury and she'd accepted. Ron Moody, who would appear in other Disney productions, was originally to play Professor Emelius Browne, but he decided that the only way he would do the picture was if he got top billing. The studio said no and replaced him with David Tomlinson.

Filming was mostly done on sound stages at the Disney Studio in Burbank, although some scenes were shot in Dorset, England in Corfe Castle. Those beach scenes with the Nazis were actually done in Southern California. Principal filming only took 57 days. The animated parts took five months and the special effects took another five months. The initial length of the finished film was 141 minutes. Because its US debut was going to be at Radio City Music Hall, the film needed to be less than two hours long. Over twenty minutes were cut to satisfy that requirement, including 3 entire songs. My guess is that was not helpful to the film's critical reception.

Upon its release, Bedknobs and Broomsticks got mixed reviews. Critics loved the technical aspects of the film but felt it took too long to get to the end. Audiences liked the movie and made it the 12th highest grossing film of the year. It also earned 5 Oscar nominations and would win for Special Effects. Bedknobs was re-released in 1979, but for some reason with a an additional twenty minutes cut out, which almost turned it into a non-musical. In 1996, Scott MacQueen, a senior manager of Disney's library, wondered why the song "A Step in the Right Direction" was on the movie's soundtrack album but not in the picture. This led him down a rabbit hole that ended with a version of Bedknobs that was restored to 139 minutes, almost its original length, as some bits and pieces were lost to the dustbin of time.

As far as I'm concerned, Bedknobs and Broomsticks stands out as a gem from the hazy time in Disney's history between Walt passing away and the renaissance of the mid eighties. I mean how can you go wrong with Angela Lansbury fighting Nazis with a army full of empty armor? Is it Mary Poppins? Of course not. It's a different movie, silly. And clearly I'm not the only one who likes it. A stage version is reportedly in the works. It will debut in 2019 and I for one, can't wait to see how they stage that epic battle.

Also on this day, in American history: Stamp Act Congress

October 1 - Dame Julie Andrews

On this day, in 1935, Julia Elizabeth Wells was born in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, England.Conceived as a result of an affair her mother had, it’s not surprising that her parents divorced before she entered grade school. Both would remarry during World War II. Julie’s father, Ted Wells, helped in the effort to evacuate children to the English countryside. Her mother, Barbara, would partner with her new husband, Ted Andrews, to entertain the troops. Julie would initially stay with her father but, recognizing her talents, he would send her to live with her mother, who he believed would be able to foster Julie’s training better.  Julie’s recollections of her stepfather are mixed at best. He was a violent alcoholic who twice tried to sleep with her, but he also paid for the lessons that made her what she is today.

Julie first attended an independent arts school in London, but it was her time with Madame Lilian Stiles-Allen that really gave her the boost she needed. Madame Lilian became like a mother to Julie and was amazed at her pupil’s voice range and clarity. Julie herself was never quite as confident in her own abilities as her mentor, but obviously enough of the Madame’s enthusiasm rubbed off to begin a long and spectacular career.

Julie’s first big break came in October 1947, when she was barely 12 years old. She sang “Je suis Titania,” an aria from Mignon in a revue called Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome. She performed so well, she would stay with the show for an entire year. As a side note, one of the other performers in that show was Wally Boag, who would make the Diamond Horseshoe Revue at Disneyland a hit. In November of 1948, Julie became the youngest solo performer ever to be in a Royal Command Variety Performance before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.

Julie then moved into radio and television. For three years she was part of a BBC radio show, Educating Archie, as the title characters girlfriend. Julie also began appearing on regional and West End stages, mostly in shows based on fairy tales and nursery rhymes. In 1952, she did her first film work as the voice of the princess in an English dubbed version of an Italian animated piece, The Singing Princess. It would be 12 more years before her next movie, but she would be too busy to worry about that.

On September 30, 1954, the day before her 19th birthday, Julie would make her Broadway debut as Polly Browne in The Boy Friend. Nearly fifty years later, she would make her directorial debut with the same show. Her success as Polly would lead to an invitation to audition for the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (spoiler: she got the part). Richard Rogers was so impressed with Julie’s performance in Lady, he put her in the 1957 live CBS broadcast of Cinderella during her run as Eliza (I suspect like many people, I didn’t know Cinderella was written for television and only later was adapted for the stage). In 1960, Julie starred in Camelot with Richard Burton and newcomer Robert Goulet. It was deemed shortly thereafter, that she lacked sufficient star power to reprise the role of Eliza Doolittle in the film version of My Fair Lady and was replaced with Audrey Hepburn. That would be a decision that would actually ensure no one would doubt the star power of Julie Andrews ever again.

Walt Disney had seen Julie perform as Queen Guinevere in Camelot and thought she was perfect for the title role in a project that had been simmering for years, Mary Poppins. At first, Julie said no as she was pregnant. Walt said “We’ll wait.” He waited, she finally agreed and a masterpiece was created. Poppins would give its star an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a Grammy and the studio its biggest financial hit ever. The following year saw the release of The Sound of Music, which gave Julie another Golden Globe and 20th Century Fox its biggest hit ever. Two more of her films released in the sixties, Torn Curtain with Paul Newman and Thoroughly Modern Millie would give Universal Studios their two biggest hits ever.

During the seventies, Julie made only a handful of films, two of which were expensive flops. She mostly did television appearances including The Muppet Show and a string of variety specials. When the eighties rolled around, Julie headlined a television special to raise funds for Cambodian Famine Victims. She did her first nude scene in S.O.B., a film directed by her husband, Blake Edwards. In 1982, she starred in Victor/Victoria with James Garner and Robert Preston, earning another Golden Globe.  In 1987, she starred in her own Christmas special that won five Emmy awards.  Julie continued producing albums, starring in movies and making television appearances through the mid-nineties. Then came the project most of her fans would, in retrospect, rather have never happened.

In 1995, Julie appeared on a Broadway stage for the first time in 35 years. The film Victor/Victoria had been turned into a stage show and she reprised the title role. The show was a success and would run for nearly two years. Unfortunately, the show’s success would contribute Julie’s downfall. In mid-1997, Julie would develop severe vocal problems, probably from the lower vocal range the role required of her. She insists that she never had any nodules or cancer form on her vocal cords, it was just muscular striation. Whatever it really was, she went in for surgery and the doctors ended up destroying her singing voice, leaving her with a rasp in even her speaking voice. Julie quipped after the botched surgery that she could now “sing the hell out of Old Man River.”  Four subsequent surgeries have improved her speaking voice, but the singing voice that wowed millions for decades is gone.

Not that Julie has slowed down much since then. She became a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She received Kennedy Center Honors. She has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She, of course, became a Disney Legend in 1991, the same year as the co-writers of Mary Poppins, Bill Walsh and Don DaGradi.  In 2001 she ramped up her association with the Walt Disney Company, starring in The Princess Diaries with Anne Hathaway and Hector Elizondo. All three would return for the sequel and Julie would even (gasp!) sing. She followed that up by playing Eloise’s nanny in two television movies based on the books by Kay Thompson. In 2005, Julie was named the Official Ambassador for Disneyland’s 50th Anniversary Celebration and hosted and narrated the parks new fireworks show. In 2007, she narrated the Amy Adams movie Enchanted.

Even though she turns 83 this year, Dame Julie continues to work steadily. Whether it’s writing children’s books with her daughter, lending her voice to ever more Shrek and Despicable Me movies or creating television shows for Netflix, she barely shows signs of slowing down. How many more delightful performances does she have in her? Only time will tell, but I, for one, smile every time I recognize her voice in something or see her on screen and I hope I’ll be doing that for years to come.

Also on this date, in American history: the Model T Ford