W&N scoops Dame Julie Andrews' Hollywood memoir

Weidenfeld & Nicholson has scooped Dame Julie Andrews’ “funny, heartrending and inspiring” account of her film career charting the star’s meteoric rise with "Mary Poppins" and "The Sound of Music".

Home Work: A Memoir of My Hollywood Years will pick-up where her acclaimed 2008 book, Home (W&N), left off, spanning the 1960s through to the late 1980s. Out on 15th October, the new book tells the tale of her arrival in Hollywood and her professional and personal highs and lows in the years that followed.

The publisher explained: “Co-written with her daughter, Emma Walton Hamilton, and told with Julie Andrews' trademark charm and candour, Home Work takes us on a rare and intimate journey into an astonishing life that is funny, heartrending and inspiring. Not only does she discuss her work in now-classic films and her collaborations with giants of cinema and television; she also unveils her personal story of adjusting to a new and often daunting world, dealing with the demands of unimaginable success, being a new mother, the end of her first marriage, embracing two stepchildren, adopting two more children, and falling in love with the brilliant and mercurial Blake Edwards.”

Alan Samson, W&N publisher and chair, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Hachette Book Group, Inc, which secured world rights all languages from Steve Sauer at Media Four in Los Angeles.

Samson said: “Dame Julie Andrews is indisputably a British national treasure, famous for her starring roles in some of the most successful and timeless films ever made. This vivid memoir of her Hollywood years recounts Julie’s personal experiences of these times, and her reflective insights will beguile and enchant her multitudes of admirers, of which I am proud to be one.”