Julie Andrews was photographed for the first time in months on a rare Hamptons outing, as the 91-year-old star keeps pulling back from on-camera work.
Page Six obtained photos of the Oscar winner being helped out of a vehicle last Friday in the Hamptons, her first public sighting in months after she turned 91 earlier this month.
Andrews wore a lilac jacket, a white baseball cap, and pink-shaded sunglasses. The images captured a quiet moment, not a red-carpet return.
That fits the path she has already described. After nearly eight decades of acting, the “Sound of Music” and “Mary Poppins” star has said she is doing far less work in front of the camera.
In an August interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Andrews made plain that retirement is not total, only different.
"I’m not completely retired, but it’s a different kind of work that I do these days, [writing] books, and I do a lot of recording of podcasts and voiceovers,"
she said. The shift is deliberate. She is choosing quieter craft over the studio grind that defined her prime.
Fans still hoped she might revisit one of her warmest late-career roles. Andrews portrayed Queen Clarisse Renaldi, the poised grandmother of Mia Thermopolis, in the 2001 film “The Princess Diaries.” Anne Hathaway, now 43, played the teenage heir to the throne of fictional Genovia.
Andrews shut down talk of returning for a third film. Her words left little room for a soft maybe.
"I think the absolute truth is that I think I’m really past all that now,"
she told The Hollywood Reporter. She added that enthusiasm was not the issue.
"It isn’t that I’m not enthusiastic for it. It’s just that I really don’t feel I should be part of it now,"
she said. That is an older star drawing her own line, not a studio memo doing it for her.
Hathaway, speaking in July on Andy Cohen’s SiriusXM show, said the sequel script is still moving, after a reset.
"The script that we were working on, we kind of had to start over with this new direction, which is not the update I think anybody wants, but we all feel really good that this is gonna be the one,"
Hathaway said. The project may continue. Andrews has already said she will not be in it.
Hollywood often treats aging legends as franchise assets first and people second. Andrews is doing the opposite: fewer cameras, more books and voice work, and a clean no when a beloved role no longer fits.
A great career ends best when the star, not the machine, decides the curtain call.