Julie Andrews has spent eighty-nine years being one of the most genuinely, warmly, completely beloved figures in the history of entertainment — the woman whose voice defined a generation’s understanding of what the human instrument could achieve at its most perfect, whose performances in Mary Poppins and The Sound of Music became so completely woven into the fabric of childhood across the English-speaking world that they stopped being films and became something closer to shared memory, and whose grace and humor and self-deprecating intelligence have made her, across six decades of public life, the kind of person that the audience does not merely admire but genuinely loves in the specific way reserved for people who seem, despite everything, to be fundamentally on your side.

The love of her life was Blake Edwards — the director, the writer, the complicated and brilliant and sometimes infuriating man she married in 1969 and remained married to for forty-one years until his death in December 2010, the partnership that gave both of them their most complete and most fully realized chapter as human beings and that produced between them a creative and personal symbiosis so genuine that the people who witnessed it from the outside described it consistently as one of the great love stories of Hollywood’s modern era. What Julie Andrews has opened up about at 89 — about losing Blake, about the specific and permanent shape of the absence he left, about what forty-one years of loving the same person does to your understanding of yourself and your understanding of what the world feels like without them in it — is the kind of testimony that only arrives from someone who has lived long enough and loved completely enough to describe grief not as something that diminishes with time but as something that changes its form, that becomes less about the daily devastation and more about the quiet, permanent presence of someone who is not there and whose not-being-there you carry with you into every room you enter for the rest of your life.