Julie Andrews lived out a singer’s worst fear following throat surgery in 1997.
“The Sound of Music” star opens up about the harrowing experience in the October/November 2019 issue of AARP The Magazine. Andrews first noticed her voice was bothering her during a Broadway show in 1997. Doctors later discovered “non-cancerous nodules” in her throat.
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“When I woke up from an operation to remove a cyst on my vocal cord, my singing voice was gone,” she reflects. “I went into a depression. It felt like I’d lost my identity.” In 1999, she filed a malpractice suit against the doctors at New York City’s Mt. Sinai Hospital. It was settled the next year for an undisclosed amount.
Her voice continued to be a problem throughout her career. In 2010, she suffered from “a certain kind of muscular striation [that] happens on the vocal cords” while “Victor/Victoria,” according to DailyMail.
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Andrews has had several operations over the years to repair her voice. Unfortunately, none of it worked. “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,” she says. “But do I miss singing: Yes. I really do.”
Andrews recently starred in 2018’s “Aquaman” and Netflix’s pre-school television series “Julie’s Greenroom”.
