(Above, Julie Andrews with Julie Christie after the latter had won the Oscar for Best Actress for her role in Darling. Other nominees that year, along with Andrews for her role in The Sound of Music, were Simone Signoret for Ship of Fools, Samantha Eggar for The Collector, and Elizabeth Hartman for A Patch of Blue.)
Today you’re getting a two-for-one. Julie Andrews and Julie Christie. I have even thought at times that it would make an interesting book, profiling them both - a kind of dual biography - and, in so doing, profiling the two sides of England, its seeming primness along with the libertinism that seams it. I began watching the Netflix series last night based on Sarah Vaughn’s novel, Anatomy of a Scandal, which is what everyone, who was not outside in the glorious weather we’ve been having here, streamed over the four-day Easter holiday and then began to discuss at work and in their own media columns yesterday. Indeed, at one point the ten-year-old daughter of the politician caught in the sex scandal with his assistant asks her mother what the word “libertine” means since she had read it capitalized in a clipping she’d found in her father’s study as it pertained to the Libertine fraternity at Oxford which, I’d guess, is based on the Bullingdon Club. Her mother’s answer was rather prim by way of an explanation. She told her it meant doing what you wanted to do but failed to contextualize it with morality, ethics, responsibility, or sexuality. Thus the child proclaimed with more than a hint of the confusing grown-up hope that she would, no doubt, grapple with from that moment on for the rest of her life as it embedded itself within her own burgeoning, budding anatomy that she was herself a libertine. Her mother quickly corrected her and stuck a frozen pizza in the oven while she fretted about the scandal defining their family and freezing it instead in headlines that contextualized it, no matter how cosseted in privilege, as scandalous. Rupert Friend plays the husband and father who is first and foremost a politician. Sienna Miller is the mother and wife. I have never been her biggest fan but there is something eerily right about her being cast in this role. Her practiced primness and its preening reliance on an overly-curated sense of style to costume it has always been limned, in my estimation, with a rebel’s need to rut and ramble in clothes from Primark that one wouldn’t mind dirtying up a bit. More ruttish than sluttish, she has even gone through a bit of a scandal - much like the one she is helping to dramatize on Netflix -when her ex-partner Jude Law admitted to having an affair with his children’s nanny. If Julie Andrews and Julie Christie had child, she’d be Sienna Miller.
I long ago forgave Julie Christie for momentarily breaking my newly ten-year-old heart when she received that Oscar over the other British Julie in 1966. I had never heard of Julie Christie until that night. I worshipped Julie Andrews however. But it was in that moment that I realized the world was much larger than the one Rodgers and Hammerstein and a hoyden with a lovely upper register had fashioned for me. There was this other world waiting that someone named John Schlesinger had fashioned, lovely in ways I suddenly longed to know about because I sensed that's where I truly belonged. It was a place already inhabited by this golden girl who had walked into my life that night and ushered me into it, this world of longing that was itself limned with a confusing grown-up hope that I would grapple with from that moment on for the rest of my life as it embedded itself within my own burgeoning, budding anatomy. Do. Re. Mi. Fa. So. La. Ti. Darling.
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