General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 202610 min read

Star!

Star! is a 1968 American musical biography film directed by Robert Wise, starring Julie Andrews as the British stage star Gertrude Lawrence, with Richard Crenna, Michael Craig, and Daniel Massey in supporting roles. Produced by Saul Chaplin for Twentieth Century-Fox, it was conceived as a reunion of the team behind The Sound of Music (1965) and became one of the era's most expensive box-office failures.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	World premiere in London on 18 July 1968; U.S. opening at the Rivoli Theatre, New York, on 22 October 1968¹
Budget	$14 million-plus, described by Variety as the eighth most expensive film in U.S. film history at the time¹
Box office	About $4.2 million in U.S. rentals; Fox estimated a loss of $15,091,000 by September 1970²^•³
Honors	Seven Academy Award nominations, including Supporting Actor for Daniel Massey as Noël Coward; Massey won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor²
Reissue	Pulled from release on 1 July 1969, trimmed, and retitled Those Were the Happy Times for an October 1969 rerelease¹
Restoration	A nearly complete print was assembled for the film's 25th anniversary in 1993 from footage preserved on 35mm reduction prints²

Spoilers

Plot

London, the years before World War I. Gertie Lawrence (Julie Andrews), a chorus girl from a working-class vaudeville family, is hungry for the spotlight and already willing to bend rules, people, and her own finances to get it. Her climb runs through understudy parts and revue sketches, staged as full-scale recreations of the numbers that made the real Lawrence famous: "Burlington Bertie," performed as shabby-genteel comedy with total command, and "Oh, It's a Lovely War," mounted on sets built to look like the West End of the 1910s.

Around the performer, the film arranges her relationships. Sir Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig), an English nobleman, courts her after she leaves her husband. The playwright Noël Coward (Daniel Massey) is her sparring partner and professional mirror, and every scene between them crackles with drawled insults and obvious affection. Gertie marries, divorces, drinks, runs up debts, and neglects her daughter Pamela, who grows old enough to understand that she comes second to the stage. The film's engine is the gap between the disciplined, magnetic professional on stage and the impulsive, careless woman off it.

The film's most celebrated sequence is "The Saga of Jenny," from the 1941 play Lady in the Dark, staged as the Circus Dream. Wise and choreographer Michael Kidd build it as a gigantic circus spectacle with a swing, acrobats, a tightrope, clowns, and live doves. The number opens with a minute of Andrews in a spotlight against an empty black backdrop, using the close-up and the spotlight as the same device to isolate her, before the full set blooms in wide shots. Andrews did all her own stunts, including floating away in a pair of wings and working the high wire, so Wise never had to cut away to a double. It is the film's argument in miniature: a stage star rendered as pure cinema.⁹

The later stretches turn wearier and more searching as the decades pass. Gertie crosses to America, and her private life comes apart in a long middle section that repeats its one argument, irresistible on stage, unreliable in life, scene after scene. She finally finds stability with the American theatrical producer Richard Aldrich (Richard Crenna), and her career crowns itself when she takes the lead in The King and I, the role the real Lawrence originated. But the triumph is cut short: illness overtakes her, and Wise stages her final decline with a restraint the rest of the film sometimes lacks. The roar of the stage gives way to the silence of the sickroom, and Gertie Lawrence dies in 1952, the contrast landing hard because the film has spent three hours making the stage feel inexhaustible. The real Lawrence's funeral was mobbed by nearly 7,000 people.²

Characters

Gertrude Lawrence (Julie Andrews) is vain, funny, selfish, wounded, and enormously alive, a genuine transformation for an actress fresh off Maria von Trapp and Mary Poppins. She handles the accents, the comic sketches, the belt-it-out numbers, and the unflattering quiet scenes where Gertie registers the damage she has done.

Noel Airman (Michael Craig) is the writer and lifelong friend who believes in her first and longest, defined almost entirely by his patience. Richard Aldrich (Richard Crenna) is the American producer who finally gives her a stable marriage. Noël Coward (Daniel Massey) captures the wit's flick-knife delivery and his affection for Gertie at once, and earned an Oscar nomination for it. Pamela (played as a child and adolescent) is the daughter raised in the margins of her mother's career, and the film's conscience.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's portrayal of Lawrence drew real anger. Lawrence's family and friends objected to the drinking, debts, and neglect depicted on screen. American critics, who saw it after a warmer international reception, turned on it savagely: Time dubbed it "The Character Assassination of Gertrude Lawrence as Performed by the Inmates of Madame Tussaud's," and Newsweek called the three-hour-ten-minute length "unconscionable."¹⁰ The film has since been reappraised, and Wise personally supervised a restoration to the original roadshow cut for its 25th anniversary in 1993.¹¹

Origins

In September 1964, immediately after completing The Sound of Music, that film's producers, Robert Wise and Saul Chaplin, invited its star, Julie Andrews, to lunch and offered her the lead in a musical about the career of Gertrude Lawrence, the British singer-dancer-actress who had died in 1952. Andrews committed to the project, according to a December 1967 trade report, on the basis of nothing more than a verbal outline. News broke on 3 November 1964, when Daily Variety announced that Andrews, Wise, and Fox would "team again" for The Gertrude Lawrence Story once Andrews finished Hawaii and Wise finished directing The Sand Pebbles.¹

Andrews owed Fox a film under the two-picture deal she had signed when cast in The Sound of Music, and Chaplin and Wise, who had enjoyed working with her, had been urging the studio to re-team them. Chaplin, a former songwriter who had produced both The Sound of Music and West Side Story (1961), seemed a natural choice to repeat the formula.² The idea for a Lawrence biography had originated in the 1950s as a planned follow-up for Judy Garland to A Star Is Born (1954), and was dropped when that film underperformed.²

Wise bought the rights to Lawrence's memoirs and to a biography by her second husband, producer Richard Aldrich, but concluded from interviews that both books were sugarcoated. Screenwriter William Fairchild suggested dramatizing that divide: most of the film unfolds as Lawrence watches an adulatory documentary about her life, shot in black and white, while color scenes show what "really happened." Wise later insisted the film was never intended as a biography but as an entertainment inspired by aspects of Lawrence's career.²

Production scale

Fox advertised the film as "the biggest musical film biography ever made." Principal photography began on 12 April 1967 at the Fox studios with a 150-day schedule, followed by location work in London, New York, Spain, and the French Riviera. The production included twenty-four musical numbers, 105 studio sets in addition to locations, and 2,961 bit players and extras. Because many songs were by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Noël Coward, the film was expected to carry one of Hollywood's largest music budgets.¹

Design and choreography were lavish even by roadshow (reserved-seat, premium-priced film engagement with overture and intermission) standards. Donald Brooks designed 3,040 costumes, including 125 for Andrews, which TCM describes as the most ever designed for a single actress in a film; the AFI catalog records 114 costumes for Andrews alone. Western Costume financed the wardrobe and rented it to other studios for years afterward. Boris Leven's sets occupied more than nine soundstages on the Fox lot, and choreographer Michael Kidd put Andrews through some of the most demanding dance work of her career; his number "Burlington Bertie" remained part of her repertoire for years.²

The film was shot in 70mm color with 35mm black-and-white sequences optically combined onto the 70mm frames to evoke vintage documentary footage. It ends with Lawrence's show-stopping performance of "Jenny" in Lady in the Dark, the 1941 Broadway triumph, rather than following her to her 1952 death.¹

Release and commercial failure

Star! premiered in London on 18 July 1968 and opened in New York on 22 October 1968 as a roadshow attraction with reserved seating, an overture, and an intermission. The roadshow market was collapsing: a year earlier Fox had invited fans to write in for ticket order forms, and although 15,000 people responded, only a fraction placed orders, and the audiences that came were older. The youth audience that was reshaping the box office had no interest in the film, and Fox's younger-skewing advertising, including a gag shot of Andrews with a motorcycle, did not help.²

The film had the misfortune of opening one month after the similar-themed Funny Girl, also a musical biography of a stage star.⁴ Against an estimated $14 million cost, it brought in only about $4.2 million in the United States.² By September 1970, Fox estimated the film had lost the studio $15,091,000.³ A December 1979 obituary for Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck stated bluntly that Star! "laid a b.o. egg" and, together with Doctor Dolittle and Hello, Dolly!, effectively ended his reign at the studio.¹

The studio's response was drastic. Accounts differ on the scale of the cutting: the Los Angeles Times reports that Fox excised 56 minutes from the nearly three-hour film and retitled it Those Were the Happy Times, sending snipping instructions directly to theaters rather than recalling prints; the AFI catalog records that Fox pulled the film on 1 July 1969, trimmed 35 minutes, and scheduled an October 1969 rerelease with a new advertising campaign. Wise himself supervised 20 minutes of cuts during the original roadshow engagements. The re-edited version downplayed Lawrence's multiple relationships, drinking, bad language, and distance from her daughter, and removed the more risqué songs, but box office at the rerelease's twenty-three theaters was "grim." Wise removed his "film by" credit from the trimmed version.⁵^•¹^•²^•⁴

Critical reception

Reviews were mixed and often harsh. Variety praised the design and technical elements but found the scenes between musical numbers sagging. The New York Times's Renata Adler wrote that people who liked old-style musicals and Julie Andrews would get their money's worth, but that admirers of Gertrude Lawrence should "stick with their record collections and memories."²^•⁶ Newsweek judged that the film "is not impossible to sit through, but neither is a nice long funeral," while Pauline Kael in The New Yorker argued that Wise and Fairchild had deliberately portrayed Lawrence as "a hard, ruthless, self-centered, almost detestable woman" and that the calculation misfired.¹^•⁷ TIME called the production "a hollow, frantic caricature," though it credited Daniel Massey with a faultlessly mimicked Coward.⁸ More favorably, Saturday Review felt Andrews had "swallowed up poor Gertrude and turned her into Julie," and the British magazine Sketch concluded that Andrews "has many more gifts than Gertie, but she hasn't got the magic."¹

The film received seven Academy Award nominations: Sound, Music (Score of a Musical Picture), Art Direction, Supporting Actor (Massey), Costume Design, Cinematography, and Original Song for the title song by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. Massey won the Golden Globe for Best Supporting Actor.¹^•²

Restoration and reassessment

The re-cut version's change of projection format from Todd-AO 70mm to 35mm inadvertently preserved the excised footage, which was thought lost for years. For the film's 25th anniversary in 1993, Fox located the missing material and assembled a new, almost complete print, given limited screenings and later released on home video. Critics began suggesting the film had been treated unfairly on its initial release, and Wise welcomed the reversal, telling the press, "It's nice to feel vindicated. I always felt it was too fine a film to be gathering dust."² Film at Lincoln Center, screening a restored 70mm print in 2012, called it "a drastically underrated last hurrah for the glories of the old-fashioned Hollywood musical."⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Films by genre, form, and subject › Documentary and biographical films › Biographical films of musicians, artists, and writers › Biographical films about visual and performing artists

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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