Star! (Studio Classics)

A musical biography of British music hall and Broadway star Gertrude Lawrence, STAR is a convincing and entertaining film, featuring an impressive score. The immensely talented Julie Andrews plays Lawrence, a beautiful, headstrong, and fiercely independent woman who will do anything for her career (including leaving her daughter and husband). Her early adventures in the music hall chorus and her later involvement in British high society are chronicled in this lush film that, though it received several Academy Award nominations, was not appreciated by the public until some 30 years after its original showing, when it was re-released. One of the most interesting, heart warming, and perhaps most famous aspects of Lawrence's story was her lifelong friendship with playwright Noel Coward (Daniel Massey, the real-life grandson of Coward), which the film accurately portrays. STAR also shows the lowlights of Lawrence's life, including her strained relationship with her daughter Pamela (Jenny Agutter), her involvement with such men as American actor Charles Fraser (Robert Reed) and English nobleman Sir Anthony Spencer (Michael Craig), and the financial difficulties she amassed from her extravagant lifestyle.