Julie Andrews Launches Book Podcast
People all over the world are looking for something comforting during the coronavirus pandemic and Academy Award winner Julie Andrews hopes to do just that with her new book podcast.
CBS News reports that Andrews will be launching “Julie’s Library” together with her daughter Emma Walton Hamilton. On the podcast, listeners will be able to hear Andrews read children’s books to them.
Hamilton said that she and her mother want families to be brought together by these stories and the podcast. Andrews also said that she hoped literacy and reading would also be encouraged by the podcast.
Andrews won an Academy Award for best actress for portraying the title character in the film “Mary Poppins.” She also played the free-spirited nun Maria in “The Sound of Music.” More recently, audiences saw her in the two “Princess Diaries” movies as well as voicing a creature called the Karathen in the “Aquaman” movie.
While Andrews is best known for her roles in movies like “Mary Poppins” and “The Sound of Music,” she has also made a name for herself as a children’s book author. Together with her daughter, Andrews has co-written more than 30 children’s books.
The move to writing was brought about by a vocal cord surgery that resulted in Andrews losing her iconic four-octave soprano singing voice. Andrews embraced writing ever since, with her daughter commenting that it was another way for her to use her voice.
“Julie’s Library” will begin on Apr. 29 with six episodes. The podcast will then debut a new episode every week, according to Just Jared.
Andrews is not the only celebrity to utilize books as a way to cope with the pandemic. Country music legend Dolly Parton also launched “Goodnight with Dolly,” a 10-episode virtual read-along series where Parton reads children’s books such as her own “Coat of Many Colors,” “There’s a Hole in the Log on the Bottom of the Lake,” “The Little Engine That Could,” and “Llama Llama Red Pajama.”
People will certainly welcome more uplifting content like Andrews’s podcast as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage around the world. There are now 2,804,797 people worldwide who are confirmed to have COVID-19, according to the World Health Organization situation report for Apr. 26. Fatalities caused by the disease now amount to 193,710 people.
In the United States, confirmed COVID-19 cases are at 928,619 people while deaths are at 52,459 people, according to the Apr. 25 update from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.