The big-selling memoir that Julie Andrews published last year ends suddenly with her aged just 28 and flying off to Hollywood to make Mary Poppins. "Everybody knows the rest," Dame Julie breezily explained, and, in the sense that the movie turned her forever into the world's foremost goody-two-shoes, this may be accurate without necessarily being true.

For behind all that winning wholesomeness lurks the suspicion of something more complex, steely, and, perhaps, troubling in the 74- year-old star's nature, and her planned return to the London stage offers a last, unexpected chance to examine it. Her fans feared they had heard the last of her when, 12 years ago, she announced her retirement from singing following an operation on her vocal chords, which she claimed had left her able to produce only "a kind of fried sound".

The one-off concert scheduled for the O2 arena next May will be a sell-out whatever sound she succeeds in making, but, after so many years away, it raises the question of what, apart from a big pay cheque, Dame Julie is hoping for. Her old, pitch-perfect voice was not simply a thing of wonder, but one uncannily suited to the prim, hyper-hygienic persona that Poppins, and its even more popular successor The Sound of Music, bestowed upon her.

She worked the career angles beautifully, even at the cost of becoming irretrievably typecast, and - to pick up where her book ends - Sixties Hollywood swooned before her quintessential Englishness. "She has achieved stardom," declared the celebrated librettist Alan Jay Lerner, "with nothing but talent, industry and an uncorrupted heart." A cover story in Time cooed: "...she is Christmas carols in the snow, a companion by the fire, a Dolce & Gabbana Handags Replica girl to read poetry to on a cold winter's night."

This wasn't the kind of praise that young starlets generally aspired to. Nor, in all probability, did it do much justice to the real Julie. The hewn-from-saccharine image was created in defiance of the evidence that Miss Andrews could be as tough, temperamental and difficult as anyone else in show business. "If that bitch is still here on Monday, I'm quitting the show," stormed Rex Harrison during their fraught Broadway run in My Fair Lady. Christopher Plummer, her Sound of Music co-star, complained that working Replica armani Shoes with her was "like being beaten over the head with a Hallmark greeting card", while Richard Harris confessed to his biographer, Michael Feeney Callan, that after making a movie with Julie he had "rarely, if ever, felt such hatred for anyone".

Even highbrow critics weighed in. Pauline Kael, the redoubtable film writer of the New Yorker predicted that The Sound of Music would be "the single most repressive influence on artistic freedom for the next few years", while the novelist Penelope Mortimer huffed that: "Miss Andrews depresses me. If her vowel sounds weren't quite so pure... I might be able to feel some sympathy for her."

A spoonful of vitriol is part of the game when arty types talk among themselves, but in Andrews's case the attacks appeared particularly

ill-founded. Was it really possible, asked her fans, that this angel-voiced essence of reassuring, middle-class mumsiness could be something entirely different off-set? Well, yes it could, and, in retrospect, it was hardly surprising. Julie Andrews did not arrive into the world like Mary Poppins - "tossed and twirling in a gust of wind" - but was born into a troubled family, riddled with rogues and boozers, in Walton-on-Thames, Surrey, in 1935. Her mother, Barbara, was a professional pianist, marrie
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