Julie Andrews is staying lively at 88 and writing books with daughter Emma Walton Hamilton. She says her coaching as a toddler star ‘gave me a piece ethic.’

This yr marks 60 years since Julie Andrews made her movie debut in Mary Poppins, a job that not solely earned the leisure icon a Greatest Actress Oscar, but in addition established her as a beloved performer for generations of kids. Greater than half a century later, the 88-year-old Andrews exhibits no indicators of slowing down. It is her voice you hear as Woman Whistledown, the gossip-loving narrator of Netflix’s interval drama Bridgerton, and she or he and her eldest daughter, kids’s e book writer and educator Emma Walton Hamilton, have simply launched their thirty fifth e book collectively, Waiting in the Wings (extra about that later).

Andrews credit her stamina to her early theatrical upbringing. The British star’s mom and stepfather have been each entertainers who have been fast to acknowledge her expertise, and far of her childhood was spent taking music classes and acting on stage alongside them. “I’m grateful for the early years of my life when the coaching was very disciplined and loopy. … It gave me a piece ethic and made me actually must be good,” she tells Yahoo Life.

Whereas she’s not breaking out within the form of boisterous dance routines made well-known in film musicals like Totally Trendy Millie and Victor/Victoria, Andrews continues to remain lively. “I’ve all my life labored out very first thing within the morning or one thing like that — rather less so today,” she says. Going to the theater or unwinding with a superb TV present or movie stays a pleasure. “It was nothing however singing observe or dancing classes … however it’s all a part of that very same stimulation for me.”

Walton Hamilton — whose father, the late Tony Walton, earned an Oscar nomination for his work as a fancy dress and set designer on Mary Poppins — has her personal idea on what retains her well-known mom thriving. “I feel it is as a result of Mother is at coronary heart a curious particular person,” she tells Yahoo Life. “She stays very and really interested in creativity.”

“And I am nonetheless studying about it,” Andrews cuts in. “I imply, it’s nothing that I really feel dashing out of me, and it takes numerous thought and [teamwork] collectively and so forth.”

In the case of kids’s bestsellers, that teamwork comes from collaborating with Walton Hamilton. Starting with the Dumpy the Dumptruck sequence in 2000, mom and daughter have written almost three dozen books collectively, profitable the Grammy for Greatest Spoken Phrase Album for Youngsters in 2011 and launching a 2017 Netflix sequence for kids, Julie’s Greenroom. Their newest image e book, Ready within the Wings, takes inspiration from the Bay Street Theater Walton Hamilton and her husband co-founded in Sag Harbor, N.Y., in 1991. Simply as within the story, a pair of geese arrange their nest in a planter within the theater’s courtyard.

“Folks would move by the courtyard by the lots of coming and going to see exhibits, and we have been so nervous that one thing would threaten the geese and they’d abandon the eggs, or one thing would occur to them,” Walton Hamilton shares. However the story has a contented ending — as does the e book, which options vibrant illustrations from EG Keller and the form of magical, anthropomorphic twist one would possibly count on from, properly, Mary Poppins.

“In fact you’ll be able to’t have geese nesting at a theater in a kids’s e book with out at the very least one in every of them going inside and seeing a present,” Walton Hamilton laughs.

As long as these inventive juices proceed to circulation, the duo seems to be ahead to working collectively on extra books for kids. As Andrews says, “There’s nothing higher than a mum sitting a toddler on her lap and tracing the phrases with a finger. And kids study to learn a lot quicker that method if you can also make it a enjoyable time and a superb time.”

Walton Hamilton’s personal kids have impressed a few of their tales, and proceed in their very own strategy to stick with it the household’s custom within the arts. And imagine it or not, they don’t seem to be so fazed with having Mary, Fräulein Maria or Queen Clarisse Renaldi of Genovia as their grandmother.

“It is a little bit totally different for youths this era as a result of they’ve grown up with YouTube and cellphones and selfies and issues like that,” Walton Hamilton says. “So seeing granny on the display screen shouldn’t be very totally different to them from seeing themselves on the display screen.”