Julie Andrews fell into depression after 1997 throat surgery destroyed her legendary singing voice: 'It felt like I’d lost my identity'
Julie Andrews, the nightingale-voiced actress who delivered unforgettable hits such as 'Mary Poppins' (1964) and 'The Sound Of Music' (1965), recently opened up about how she fell into serious depression after she lost her singing voice after an operation in 1997.
In an interview with AARP for their October/November 2019 issue, the 84-year-old said that she first noticed that her voice was hoarse during a Broadway show in 1997.
She was initially led to believe by doctors that she suffered from "non-cancerous nodules" in her throat and agreed to get a surgery done at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital.
She was shocked to discover that after going under the knife her four-octave soprano singing voice was permanently destroyed. "When I woke up from an operation to remove a cyst on my vocal cord, my singing voice was gone," the 'Princess Diaries' star told the publication. "I went into a depression. It felt like I’d lost my identity."
Two years after the operation, she filed a malpractice suit against the doctors at Mount Sinai Hospital, which was settled in September 2000 for an undisclosed amount. In a previous interview, Julie stated that it would be years later that she would discover that all she suffered from was "a certain kind of muscular striation [that] happens on the vocal cords" after her voice was strained while making 'Victor/Victoria' (1982).
Although she has built a career beyond her singing talent, Julie still believes that it was her pre-surgery voice that made her the star she is today. "I would have been quite a sad lady if I hadn’t had the voice to hold on to. The singing was the most important thing of all, and I don’t mean to be Pollyanna about how incredibly lost I’d have been without that," she said.
She has had several operations to get back her original voice but to no avail. However, her need to look for an alternate career opened up new doors for her.
"But by good fortune that’s when my daughter Emma and I had been asked to write books for kids," added the mother-of-three. "So along came a brand-new career in my mid-60s. Boy, was that a lovely surprise. But do I miss singing: Yes. I really do."