JULIE ANDREWS - ANDREWS WAS LOVECHILD OF HER MOTHER'S AFFAIR

ANDREWS WAS LOVECHILD OF HER MOTHER'S AFFAIR

British actress JULIE ANDREWS has revealed for the first time how her world was shattered when she learned she was conceived as the result of her mother's affair with a family friend. The Sound Of Music star, 72, breaks her 58-year silence to describe the moment her mum Barbara told her the heartbreaking news in forthcoming autobiography Home: A Memoir Of My Early Years. Andrews, then 13, was asked by Barbara to perform at a friend's house - a pal she would later find out was her biological father. She recalls, "After I had sung, the owner of the house approached me. He was tall and fleshly handsome, and I recognised him as a man who had come round to visit the (house) once or twice in earlier years. "That evening the man came and sat on the couch next to me. I remember feeling an electricity between us that I couldn't explain." Moments afterwards, as Andrews and her mother were driving home, Barbara announced: "That man is your father." She describes how her brain "slammed into defence mode" as she struggled to absorb the information that the man she called "Daddy" - Ted Wells - was not her real father. But she refused to let the shocking news change her feelings towards Wells, who Barbara had divorced in 1939, when Andrews was just four. She goes on, "Somehow, I was able to push it to a dark corner of my mind. It did not alter the fact that the man who had raised me was the man I loved. I would always consider him my father." And Andrews was further confounded after learning Wells had known of his wife's infidelity all along, exclaiming: "That simply knocked me sideways." Barbara went on to marry Canadian entertainer Ted Andrews, whose surname Andrews adopted as her own.