Julie Andrews: 'My voice sounds like chalk on a blackboard'

The 75-year-old actress said she has never re-gained her voice following a 1997 operation to remove a cyst on one of her vocal cords, and that losing her ability to sing plunged her into “a huge decline”.

“[My] voice sounds like it’s chalk on a blackboard when I sing certain notes,” she told US chat show host Oprah Winfrey.

“There is no cure for what I have. I have about six good low, low notes and I can sing the hell out of Old Man River, if you really want me to.”

Speaking on Thursday’s show, Andrews told Winfrey how her throat operation was a result of being overworked on Broadway.

The Mary Poppins star said she had been on stage for around 20 months rather than the planned 11, and had been “very vocally tired”.

A week after leaving the Broadway production of Victor/Victoria, she checked into Manhattan’s Mount Sinai Medical Centre to have the cyst removed.

“Tissue was removed and I didn’t have cancer, I didn’t have nodules, I didn’t have anything. Sadly, it was not a successful operation. I had to work and deal with the loss of the voice because it doesn’t come back,” she said.

Andrews said she dealt with the loss by throwing herself into writing books with her daughter Emma, with whom she has a small publishing company, The Julie Andrews Collection.

She said: “One day, I said to my Emma, ‘I miss singing so much’, and she said ‘Mum, you’ve just found a different way of using your voice.’”