Reviews for Home work : a memoir of my Hollywood years
Publishers Weekly
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Singer and actor Andrews, writing with her daughter Hamilton, offers a sincere and inspiring account of her life, focusing on her Hollywood years beginning in 1962. After a brief recap of her youth in England (covered in more detail in her earlier memoir, Home), Andrews recounts her first movie role in Mary Poppins and her experiences in the Disney studios, where Walt Disney himself offered “fatherly kindness” to the young actress, who was newly a mother and married to her childhood sweetheart, set and costume designer Tony Walton. Her next big role—again, as a nanny—was in The Sound of Music. Writing of her role in 1966’s Torn Curtain, she shares behind-the-scenes tales of Alfred Hitchcock’s wry humor, as well as shooting an “anything but dreamy” love scene with Paul Newman. Her marriage collapsed from the strain of work and travel, but in 1969 she met the mercurial producer Blake Edwards at a traffic intersection on Sunset Boulevard. Andrews shares tales of her colleagues (Peter Sellers was testy on The Pink Panther set; Dudley Moore charmed her in Ten) as well as her efforts to stabilize her marriage to Edwards (they remained married until his death in 2010). This charming account of Andrews’s professional and personal life will no doubt serve to make the venerated performer all the more beloved. (Oct.)
Book list
From Booklist, Copyright © American Library Association. Used with permission.
It's been awhile since Andrews' first memoir, Home (2008), so she begins her second warm, graceful, and candid look back with a crisply orienting recap of her life in England as a child performer who dropped out of school to support her dysfunctional family. Her struggle to balance her longing for a stable home life with her devotion to her work underlies her phenomenal artistic evolution. Andrews begins here with her first triumph on Broadway and Walt Disney whisking her off to Hollywood, knowing that he had found the perfect Mary Poppins. A journal keeper and children's-book author as well as a gloriously gifted singer and actor, Andrews, along with her steadfast coauthor, tells captivating, sweetly self-deprecating, funny, and painful behind-the-scenes tales about her many movie adventures and frankly recounts the end of her first marriage and the high drama of her second as she and renowned director Blake Edwards collaborated cinematically and in creating a complicated extended family often beset with traumas. This deeply pleasurable and forthright chronicle illuminates the myriad reasons home work has such profound meaning for artist and humanitarian Andrews. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Andrews' star power is one lure; the other is her treasury of delectable Hollywood revelations.--Donna Seaman Copyright 2019 Booklist
