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Victor/Victoria

 

"IT was a difficult, multi-faceted role. I mean I’d sometimes be playing a woman trying to be a man, then sometimes play a man with a woman’s feelings, and sometimes just straight on. There were so many things to work out."

"It completely turned my head around. It was an extremely difficult role."

Julie Andrews on Victor/Victoria

Victor Victoria Victoria is a poverty-stricken soprano trying to find work in turn-of-the-century Paris. With the help of a worldly-wise nightclub singer, she invents her alter-ego Victor, a female impersonator who is hired to sing at a fashionable night spot. "You want me to be a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman?" Interwoven throughout the comedy and musical numbers are some surprisingly astute observations about gender perceptions, discrimination and the battle of the sexes.


Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews

Directed By

Blake Edwards
Screenplay By
Blake Edwards, Han Hoemburg
Music By
Henry Mancini, Leslie Bricusse
Release Date/Runtime
19 March 1982
132 Minutes
Character
Victoria Grant/Count Victor Grezhinski
Cast
 
Julie Andrews, James Garner, Robert Preston, Lesley Ann Warren, Alex Karras
   

 

Victor Victoria Curiosities
 
The script was based on the 1933 German movie Viktor und Viktoria by Reinhard Schenzel and Hans Hoenburg, it then became the basis of a successful Broadway musical also starring Julie Andrews and directed by Blake Edwards.
 
Blake wrote the movie with Julie Andrews and Peter Sellers in mind, but Sellers had died, so Robert Preston replaced him as the gay impresario Toddy.
 
Both Julie Andrews and Lesley Ann Warren (Norma Cassidy) starred as Cinderella in TV productions of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella.
Julie Andrews really is terrified of cockroaches.
 
The cockroaches were in a kind of deep freeze coma. They were placed where necessary for the scene and heated with a hair dryer. The crew could only hope that they went in the right direction and no one knew quite where they went after filming of the scene was completed.
 
The movie was made at Pinewood Studios, outside London, on nine sound stages.
 
The young man who says Victor is "divine" at rehearsal is Blake Edwards' son and Julie Andrews' stepson, Geoffrey Edwards.
 
Robert Preston did the final musical number in one take.
 
Director Blake Edwards admitted in an interview that he "chickened out", and added the scene in which King Marchand (James Garner) discovers that Victoria (Julie Andrews) is indeed a woman. Originally he was to fall in love with Victoria before he was sure about her gender, hence his line "I don't care if you are a man" before he kisses her.
 
Victor/Victoria was a very deserved success on its opening in April 1982 and garnered a total of seven Academy Award nominations.
 
At the time the movie was coming out, Julie was named Woman of the Year by Harvard University's Hasty Pudding Club. In accepting the award, a trophy in the form of a pot, she asked, "Is it all right if I throw up in it?"

 

 

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