Iconic actress Julie Andrews, 90, has shared that she has retired from onscreen acting appearances and will not appear in The Princess Diaries 3, as she rejected returning as Queen Clarisse
Julie Andrews on The Graham Norton Show(Image: PA)
Julie Andrews has announced her retirement from acting onscreen after rejecting a return to The Princess Diaries. The 90-year-old has enoyed a near 80-year career, and starred in hit movies from Mary Poppins to The Sound of Music and amassed multiple awards, including three Emmys, two Grammys, and an Oscar.
However, now Julie has revealed she is taking a huge step back, confirming her on-screen days are over
Julie said retirement was the “best description” for how she was approaching her career. She made the statement after being asked if she would return with the rest of the cast for the third Princess Diaries’ film.
Julie said film bosses had asked her “all last year if I would be keen” and that she found it difficult to refuse.
The star told InStyle Magazine acting had been a “wonderful ride” but felt she was too old now to appear on camera.
The last time Julie acted on-screen was 2010, when she appeared as Lily, the head fairy in Dwayne Johnson’s Tooth Fairy. She has made appearances as herself in various TV shows, but the majority of her work in the past 16 years has been voice acting. She has voiced Lady Whistledown on Bridgerton since 2020 and most recently voiced Marlena in Minions: The Rise of Gru in 2022.
Julie said she is more happy to keep doing voice acting, as she can record her lines from the comfort of her own home. “I do it mostly to keep my brain alive,” she admitted.
In The Princess Diaries, Julie played Queen Clarisse, the grandmother of Anne Hathaway’s Mia, a San Franciscan student who finds out that she is actually the heir to the throne of a small European nation. The news that Julie won’t do another Princess Diaries film will surely be sad to Anne, who previously told Entertainment Tonight that she wanted Julie to come back for a third film.
“We would go to where she was and put a green screen behind her and just make it happen,” Anne said. Anne is set to reprise her role as Queen Mia Thermopolis in the film.
Though she kept the details under wraps, she told SiriusXM that the filmmakers had to “start over” with their script and go in a “new direction”. She continued: “But we all feel really good that this is gonna be the one.”
Julie’s recent words comes just a few months after she made a rare public appearance to raise awareness for Parkinson’s. She appeared in a video to launch the World Parkinson’s Congress conference. In the video, the British star explained that she knows first-hand just how “devastating” the condition can be for people.
Speaking in the video, shared on YouTube by the World Parkinson Coalition, she said: “Good evening, everyone, I’m Julie Andrews, and I’m pleased to welcome you to the seventh World Parkinson’s Congress. Your participation is invaluable as we seek to find a cure to this terrible disease. I know well how devastating it can be.”
Julie has battled her own health issues over the years. She was forced to quit a stage production of Victor/Victoria back in 1997 when she developed a hoarseness in her throat and underwent surgery to remove “a cyst” from her vocal cord. She told AARP The Magazine in 2019 that, when she woke up, her singing voice was gone.
“I went into a depression,” she said. “It felt like I’d lost my identity.” In 1999, Julie filed a malpractice lawsuit against the doctors who performed the surgery. Ten years later, she revealed that the non-cancerous nodules she thought were being removed from her throat at the time didn’t actually exist and that she had instead been suffering from “a certain kind of muscular striation”.
The actress has since had several operations to repair her voice. “Do I miss singing?” she asked herself. “Yes I really do. I would have been quite a sad lady if I hadn’t had the voice to hold on to.”
Like this story? For more of the latest showbiz news and gossip, follow Mirror Celebs on TikTok , Snapchat , Instagram , Twitter , Facebook , YouTube and Threads .
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: mirror.co.uk
