Looking back at her career now, Andrews, who’s 84, told me in October-when she called from her home in Long Island to discuss Home Work-that what surprises her most is how arduous it all was. (Which would bring a bold new meaning to “Jolly Holiday.”) Before she turned 30, Andrews had played two of the most canonical female characters in film-a kind of reputational alchemy that is hard for an actor to reverse. If Andrews does cocaine, Mary does it too.

Both that particular role and one that followed, The Sound of Music’s Maria von Trapp, became distinct amalgamations of actor and character it was hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. But for Andrews, Poppins was far more complicated.

Mary Poppins, the acerbic, reality-bending, devastatingly self-assured nanny who sweeps down from the sky on an anthropomorphized umbrella in Walt Disney’s groundbreaking 1964 movie, was the first heady obsession of countless little girls, myself included. The scene is at once totally charming, enormously on-brand for Andrews-who has the purest heart, it would seem, in show business-and quietly telling. “She doesn’t need any of that stuff,” he told everyone. “The peer pressure was intense.” Finally, Edwards intervened. “The hosts began pushing me hard, curious to see how ‘Mary Poppins’ would react,” she writes. “We were so seldom partygoers.” When the couple arrived, they noticed guests doing cocaine in the living room by the time everyone had eaten dinner, lines were being passed around for dessert. “I can’t remember why we chose to attend,” Andrews writes in her new memoir, Home Work. In 1971 the actor Julie Andrews and her husband, the director Blake Edwards, went to a party hosted by a Hollywood agent in Los Angeles.

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