Pietro Annigoni: Julie Andrews

"Portrait of Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle"
by Pietro Annigoni

"Not long after the musical 'My Fair Lady' opened at Drury Lane in May 1958, an American visiting Florence told me that the actress' manager wanted me to paint her for him. Although I hardly knew who Julie Andrews was then, I agreed, but nearly a year went by before I was able to start the portrait. On the day I arrived in London, the manager, Charles Tucker, took me to see the show and to meet the young actress. I was pleasurably surprised by both and decided there and then to paint her in the costume and character of Eliza Doolittle, the show's Cockney flowergirl.

When she sat for me I found her to be a very sweet girl. But, oh, she was so unpunctual! She came to me every weekday afternoon, except on matinée days, for about six weeks. There were more than twenty sittings altogether and for the first half-dozen of them she came more than twenty minutes late. It made me so angry that when she came - late again - for the seventh sitting, I did not open the door to her. She knocked and knocked and then went away. Half an hour passed; then she telephoned full of apologies and promised to keep better time in future. At her next sitting she explained that she was soon to be married and was very busy with wedding preparations. That news was ultimately of advantage to me because her husband-to-be, stage designer Tony Walton, was the son of a doctor, and Dr. Walton discovered that a pain in the upper part of my right arm, which had long been troubling me, was due to a cracked humerus. And he treated it successfully.

I worked a great deal on the portrait between sittings, often late at night, and finished it in two months. Julie liked it and, I believe, would have liked to buy it from her manager, but he would not sell Instead, I was told, he promised to leave it to her in his will. But he must have been joking, for on 5th November 1975, it was put up for auction at Sotheby's by his widow and was sold for seven thousand pounds. My fee for it was two thousand, of which the astute Mr. Tucker quickly recouped a large part by selling exclusive newspaper reproduction rights." 

To be continued 

(Excerpted from "Pietro Annigoni: An Artist's Life" by Pietro Annigoni, 1977.)