turns

NEW YORK — “860,” the title of Billy Crystal’s tremendously moving new Broadway show at the Imperial Theatre, refers to the address of his house in the Pacific Palisades that was destroyed in last year’s fire.

Crystal re-creates the events of Jan. 7, 2025, as the wildfire that began in the Santa Monica Mountains started making its way down toward his home at 860 Chautauqua Blvd. Video clips of the escalating emergency are shown as a cardigan-clad Crystal, standing in a facsimile of his home office (the conjuring work of scenic designer Scott Pask), re-creates the horror of having to decide what to take with him as the evacuation orders come in.

The photos, awards and other memorabilia aren’t just souvenirs of his storied career. They are pieces of the life he built with his wife, Janice, and their two daughters as well as a record of the friendships that made Hollywood feel like a welcoming community for a wide-eyed Long Island kid.

“860,” impeccably directed by Scott Ellis, occurs in a series of flashbacks. Crystal brings us back to what it was like as he and his wife made their way across a jam-packed Sunset Boulevard in separate cars to the safety of their daughter’s house as smoke and flying embers turned their small-town paradise overlooking the Pacific Ocean into an apocalyptic war zone.

A baseball superfan, Crystal gives us the play-by-play as though he were calling a World Series game that had taken an unimaginable turn. Hana S. Kim and Kylee Loera’s video design turns us into eyewitnesses of that terrible day.

I was in Los Angeles when the Palisades and Eaton fires broke out, but I was far enough away not to feel the immediacy of the threat. Crystal had me in full fight-or-flight mode, as if I were in the car behind him going 5 mph along the only route out of danger.

Billy Crystal in “860” at the Imperial Theatre on Broadway.

(Avery Brunkus)

Making a show about a recent public trauma isn’t easy to pull off, but Crystal has managed it as perhaps only he could. “860” is a meditation on loss, but it’s also a theatrical memoir of his multifarious career as a comic, actor, filmmaker and celebrated Oscar host. He returns to his days on “Soap,” the controversial nighttime parody of a daytime soap opera created by Susan Harris that featured Crystal in the role of Jodie Dallas, one of TV’s first openly gay characters.

Crystal was living in an apartment in then-smog-filled Hancock Park with his wife and daughters when he was filming the show’s third season. The couple wanted to move to an area that had better air quality for their children, and someone asked if he knew about the Pacific Palisades.

“It was a small town, good schools, beautiful afternoon breezes from the nearby ocean, one main street with some shops, a deli named Mort’s that had lean corned beef and a lot of people who didn’t put mayonnaise on pastrami,” Crystal recounts.

The house they came to see wasn’t for them, but a for-sale sign at 860 Chautauqua caught their eye. The real estate agent told them that the owners “were very motivated to sell because they were very motivated not to be together anymore.”

It was December 1979 when, with a 30-year mortgage in hand, they moved into the house. Two women who grew up at 860 (“Imagine the twins from ‘The Shining’ — but they’re 55”) paid a welcome call to say how pleased they were that their former home was back in the hands of show people.

The original owners were vaudevillians who had a mind-reading act and were passionately into the occult. They socialized with the comic luminaries of their day, including humorist Will Rogers, who would regularly stop by on his horse. Behind a secret wall, Crystal found a hidden room with a cork board that had clippings that suggested maybe it wasn’t such an accident that the house became his.

Crystal, the emcee of all emcees (as his performance at this year’s Hollywood Bowl Opening Night once again proved), tells the story of his home with buoyant humor and charm, turning loss into living memory. To set up the meaning of what was destroyed, he takes us back to his roots, starting with his graduation in 1970 from NYU, where he took a film production class with a young Martin Scorsese, who would critique his work in a manner that Crystal, the Al Hirschfeld of celebrity impersonators, hilariously captures.

Crystal’s comic timing was honed in the clubs doing stand-up. Jack Rollins, the producing titan who managed Mike Nichols, Elaine May and Woody Allen, imparted some wisdom after watching Crystal’s act. Crystal thought he killed it that night, but Rollins told him that he failed to “leave a tip,” meaning reveal something about himself in his jokes.

Opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears in Scranton, Pa., a huge opportunity, Crystal faced a hostile audience. But he won the crowd over and thought maybe he could really make this stand-up comedy thing work. But then he was sent back out onstage after lead singer David Clayton-Thomas decided he didn’t want to perform and had to win the jeering music fans over again — and then a third time. While driving home on the New Jersey Turnpike to his wife and baby that night, he felt his future in front of him, having found not only his calling but also his voice.

Crystal’s luckiest break may have been in not being drafted during the Vietnam War, but a close second was being invited to do his Howard Cosell-Muhammad Ali routine at a televised gala for the boxing legend. Crystal not only crushed it but he made a lifelong friend in Ali, who was already his personal hero.

Bonds forged in comedy, like the one he had with Robin Williams, deepened into a lasting brotherhood. Norman Lear cast Crystal as Rob Reiner’s best friend on “All in the Family,” and life imitated art. Their successful collaborations — crystallized in the fake orgasm scene at Katz’s Delicatessen in “When Harry Met Sally” — were an outgrowth of their telepathic comic rapport.

In reviewing his famous life, Crystal reanimates parts of our own. And it’s this shared history that helps us understand what he lost when his house went up in flames. The magnitude of the devastation is made personal for all of us.

But just when you think things can’t get any worse, something completely unthinkable happens. For Crystal, this occurred at the end of 2025, his annus horribilis, when Reiner and wife Michelle were found stabbed to death at their Brentwood home.

Some things are too painful for words, and Crystal knows that sense cannot be made from senselessness. But he’s already told us so much about this unique friendship that nothing more needs to be said.

Crystal doesn’t wallow in grief or self-pity. He bears the weight of his losses with his wit and generous spirit to help us carry the weight of our own. (When he walked into a store to buy a new wardrobe after the fire, he reports, the salesclerk looked at him and said, “Let me guess … Ozempic?”)

No one gets out of this world without becoming a master of the art of losing, to invoke the poet Elizabeth Bishop. But laughter can sustain us through our losses, and Crystal thinks it’s no accident that one of the few things that was salvaged from the ashes of his home was a stone from his garden with the word “laughter” engraved on it.

I found Crystal’s previous solo show “700 Sundays” to be a touch mawkish, so I wasn’t expecting to be so powerfully moved by “860.” But this is just a brilliantly conceived and executed piece, and I hope it yields Crystal another Tony Award.

But even more, I hope the production finds its way home to where it belongs, Los Angeles. We could really use the fortifying laughter.

While growing up in Palo Alto, it was not uncommon for animator Lisa Hanawalt to pretend she was a horse. This game of make-believe was a way for Hanawalt to escape her “burdensome and awkward” body, as she writes in her candid new illustrated memoir, “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses And Sex.” “But when I was a horse, I was powerful, graceful, and gorgeous.”

Although Hanawalt might be an unapologetic horse girl, she really hates a horse pun. So when it came time to choose a title for the book, she decided to keep it literal. “This is just the most true version of what this book actually is,” Hanawalt says about the utterly confessional nature of her book’s title, which groups two seemingly unrelated subjects that her mind wanders to when she’s bored. “They’re the two most mentally engaging things I can imagine,” she writes as a self-described “anixous lil freak.”

“I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex” by Lisa Hanawalt

(Drawn & Quarterly)

Sitting in her Los Angeles home, the designer of such adult animated touchstones as Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman,” “Long Story Short,” and her personal creation “Tuca & Bertie” is drinking from a mug of tea as we chat over Zoom. When I ask what people’s responses have been so far to her book’s cheeky title, she says, “They just laugh. A lot of them are just like, ‘Well, I have to read that.’”

In many ways, “I Can’t Stop” represents a culmination of Hanawalt’s shtick for truth-telling via colorful anthropomorphized characters. The 43-year-old’s sketches are famously loose, bright and unrefined. Topics like weird body stuff, sex and horniness are never off the table. A typical drawing might feature an animal-human hybrid (say, a bird head on a human body) doing something utterly mundane while Hanawalt’s inner monologue appears in thought bubbles to reveal an intensely personal thought most people would never say out loud, let alone publish in a book.

“They all have personal things in them, some more overtly than others,” Hanawalt says about her particular oeuvre, which includes 2013’s “My Dirty Dumb Eyes,” 2016’s “Hot Dog Taste Test,” 2018’s “Coyote Doggirl” and 2020’s archival collection “I Want You,” as well as countless contributions over the years to publications like the New York Times, McSweeney’s, Vanity Fair and the now-defunct women’s humor blog the Hairpin.

“I think [‘I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex’] fits in with ‘My Dirty Dumb Eyes’ and ‘Hot Dog Taste Test’ in that it’s another kind of mishmash book, and it all goes together in my mind,” Hanawalt adds of her nonlinear storytelling, which in this book intersperses memories of couples therapy and egg-freezing with drawings of a sloth dancing with a bear. Or a deep dive on the filmography of Kevin Costner.

Hanawalt has never shied away from getting personal, but there’s no question that “I Can’t Stop” takes her disarming and revelatory style to a new level. “I think it just needed that extra layer of me going through a midlife crisis and breaking up with my partner and going through all this weird stuff. It’s a weird combo with the horse stuff because my love of horses is so pure.”

An illustration from “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex” by Lisa Hanawalt.

(Drawn & Quarterly)

If Hanawalt ever felt embarrassment at being a horse girl (and she certainly has — as she got older, Hanawalt eased off of the horse games out of fear of being bullied), that shame has since evaporated. About eight years ago, as she faced a combination of career burnout and gut-health issues, Hanawalt started taking riding lessons in an attempt at self-care. “There’s something about riding that clears my head and eases my physical pain, for a moment,” she writes in a comic titled “How I Got a Horse.” When her then-partner (comedian and podcaster Adam Conover) noted how relaxed Hanawalt seemed when she’d return home from riding, he urged her to consider buying a horse of her own.

So Hanawalt reactivated her dormant Facebook account and began scrolling through local horse sale groups. That’s where she discovered Juniper (“Juni” for short), a 2006 Norwegian Fjord Mare. “I bought her somewhat impulsively,” Hanawalt says. “It was a huge lifestyle shift. Having a horse is often very stressful because it’s like a pet you have to rent an apartment for. It’s expensive, and they injure themselves … But then, being with her, I’m present in a way that I never am in the rest of my life. It just feels nice to care for another creature, human or animal.”

Spending time with Juni and a cast of new friends at the stables was physically and emotionally therapeutic for Hanawalt, particularly as new issues began to sneak up on her. For instance, she began to wonder if she still wanted to remain child-free. Simultaneously, her long-term relationship of 14 years was beginning to come apart. She describes in the book how she and Conover made a Hail Mary attempt at ethical nonmonogamy — an experience she’s glad to have had, even if Hanawalt jokes today about how she’s “a true polyamory fail.” She adds, “I don’t think it’s for me at all, and I never did. But I was willing to give it a go [as a] last-ditch effort to save something I really cared about. I think that’s the case for a lot of people.”

An illustration from “I Can’t Stop Thinking About Horses and Sex” by Lisa Hanawalt.

(Drawn & Quarterly)

Hanawalt admits how anxious she was to talk about her breakup in the book — so much so that she considered avoiding it altogether. “I was dancing around it, and then I was like, ‘I don’t need to explain every little part of it,’” she says. Hanawalt even solicited creative feedback from Conover, who responded by playing her bits of a new stand-up special, which showcased his perspective of their breakup (that special will be the forthcoming “Big Divorce Energy,” out Oct. 23 on YouTube).

“It’s really nice that we still have that kind of relationship,” Hanawalt says of her ongoing connection and friendship with Conover. “Because I really value his opinion and input. He’s just a really smart, creative person, and that was always a strong point in our relationship. I also just wanted him to be OK with how I was representing us. I’m still very protective of that.”

The latter half of “I Can’t Stop” finds Hanawalt processing the end of her relationship, dipping a toe back into the dating world, and exploring fertility options such as egg-freezing. Despite its heavy subject matter — one especially tough passage looks back at a sexual assault Hanawalt experienced when she was an adolescent — “I Can’t Stop” is packed with absurdist doodles that keep the mood light without seeming dismissive. For example, as she describes how Juni behaves when she’s in heat, Hanawalt considers her own overwhelming “livestock mode,” which once included a hyper-fixation on Kevin Costner. This is all laid out in a section titled “Costner Watch,” where Hanawalt decides to consume every film the actor ever made.

Artist and author Lisa Hanawalt with her beloved horse Juniper.

(Annie Noelker / For The Times)

“Yeah, I was losing my mind,” Hanawalt laughs at “Costner Watch.” “I don’t know. It was a cope, in hindsight.”

As she prepares to celebrate the release of “I Can’t Stop” with a six-date book tour, Hanawalt can’t say for sure if she’s answered any existential midlife questions. She jokes that her eggs are “still on ice.” She’s working on several new animation projects, though isn’t sure at this point which, if any, will move forward. (It probably also doesn’t help that the animation industry is currently experiencing a severe downturn, with record-high unemployment among even the most seasoned creators. “It’s a weird time,” she says.) To round things out, Hanawalt says she’s “selling hats” and even working with a perfume maker to eventually release a “horsey-themed” fragrance.

Hanawalt also has no clue what being a self-proclaimed horse girl even means in the year 2026. The other horse people she hangs out with at the barn, where Juni lives, come from “every possible income level and political belief, and they’re all kind of shoved together,” Hanawalt tells me. “It’s kind of like ‘Lord of the Flies.’

“It’s just so fun to have a community with people and be able to trust them,” Hanawalt says of the friendships she’s made through caring for Juni. “We help each other. Just to be able to go out on the trail and talk about blow jobs or whatever with women I truly connect to … They’re some of the coolest people I’ve ever met in my whole life.”

All that is to say, Hanawalt has grown more comfortable in not quite knowing what’s next. “You’re never fully happy or fulfilled,” she says. “And that’s part of being alive.”

Catch Lisa Hanawalt live Oct. 22 at 7 p.m. at Skylight Books in conversation with Priyanka Mattoo. 1818 N. Vermont Ave., Los Angeles.

Brodsky is an L.A. culture and music writer. Her biography of Stevie Nicks, “Lessons & Lace,” published by Penguin Random House, is out now.

Like many buff-bodied Traitors hunks before him… Tom Daley… Freddie Fraser… James Blunt stepped up to take on the pensive shower cutaway scene in this year’s series.

Viewers were left in hysterics by James’ take – nipples out, thoughtfully scrubbing himself in a very awkward manner and donning a shower cap – all while puzzling over whether he’d be next for murder.

Fans took to X to share their excitement at the scenes.

“Not James Blunt in the shower!!!” cried one.

Others soon chimed in:

“James Blunt with a shower cap and huge brush was just not on my 2026 bingo card.”

“Can only assume that James Blunt is taking his first ever shower and is more of a bath man.”

“All of these shower scenes from previous seasons have nothing on James Blunt and his haircap and scrubber.”

Fans are hoping it doesn’t mean the end for the British Army Captain. In last year’s Celebrity edition, poor Tom Daley was murdered hours after he stripped off.

If we’ve learned anything it’s that you can be too squeaky clean when it comes to the Traitors.

With Temecula Valley off to a 6-0 start in high school football, the Golden Bears can thank senior kicker and punter Colin Elia for making major contributions.

He’s 13 for 13 on PATs and six for seven on field goals, including a long of 49 yards, and averaging more than 36 yards on punts.

He didn’t play football until his sophomore year when friends asked him to join the team. He finally convinced his parents to let him play. Let’s say it was a compromise. He wanted to play receiver. He got permission to be the kicker.

The rest is history.

“I’m joking with my mom she’s happy to let me play now,” Elia said.

He made a game-winning field goal as a sophomore on varsity when the other kickers were unavailable. Last season as a junior, he made 10 of 11 field-goal attempts. He continues to improve as he uses his soccer background.

One thing is certain: Pressure moments don’t bother him. In fact, he looks forward to them.

He also credits his long snapper and holder for helping him succeed.

This is a daily look at the positive happenings in high school sports. To submit any news, please email eric.sondheimer@latimes.com.

There is no love like municipal infrastructure love.

It was late in the 20th century when my wife, Mary Frances, and I moved into Los Feliz. Quickly we learned that our corner of the neighborhood was known as Franklin Hills, and that just about every eastward outing would take us across a funny little bridge with eight pointy turrets. That bridge was the Shakespeare Bridge.

As a teacher at nearby Ivanhoe Elementary, Mary Frances crossed the bridge twice every school day for more than 20 years. As a student there, our daughter Grace crossed it for six years, usually with me as chauffeur.

We’ve crossed it at all hours in every kind of weather, on foot, on bikes and in cars, talking about school, work, family and, lately, the fractured state of the nation and world.

Now that bridge on Franklin Avenue at St. George Street is near its 100th anniversary and an Oct. 10 neighborhood celebration is in the works, complete with a street party and procession. As the day approaches, I keep thinking about how large a funny little bridge can become in the lives of its neighbors.

This view looks westward across L.A.’s Franklin Avenue Bridge, also known as the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Library of Congress)

Originally it was the Franklin Avenue Bridge, designed by J.C. Wright of the city’s civil engineering department in the mid-1920s, when a twenty-something cartoonist named Walt Disney was new to the neighborhood and the Vitagraph Studios, a block away, were transitioning from silent films to talkies.

Paid for by a controversial city assessment of neighbors, the bridge is 262 feet long and 30 feet wide — a pipsqueak compared with landmarks like Pasadena’s Colorado Street Bridge or the 6th Street Bridge between Boyle Heights and downtown L.A.’s Arts District. Its three open-spandrel arches were made using Portland cement.

Nobody knows where the Shakespeare nickname came from, but city officials designated the bridge as L.A.’s Historic-Cultural Monument No. 126 in 1974 and retrofitted it in the 1990s to better withstand earthquakes. Crucially, city staffers preserved those charming and entirely unnecessary turrets, which deserve their own sonnet, if you ask me.

“Back then, people put some thought into these things,” City Council aide Tom LaBonge told this newspaper in 1988, years before he became councilman (2001-15) for the district that includes the bridge.

Since 2017, neighbors have tended a Shakespeare Bridge Garden beneath the span. The neighbors (a.k.a. the Franklin Hills Residents Assn.) also pay to keep up the landscaping on the nearby traffic island.

When the bridge went up, L.A. “was becoming a city,” said Alison Wallace, president of the FHRA. “We were trying to look legit, and people were adding all of these amazing public works.”

The result, Wallace said, was a span that eased connections between neighborhoods and “helped us become a community.”

This view looks from below the Franklin Avenue Bridge, also known as the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Library of Congress)

Many architectural sources call its style Gothic Revival. Some see Moorish influence. Researcher Tiger Shankman has hailed its “perky, anachronistic beauty.” In “An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles,” authors David Gebhard and Robert Winter suggest that the ornate ends of the bridge “cry out for sculptured saints.”

Instead of saints, however, the bridge has seen a lot of actors and film crews. The bridge turns up in the movies “Dead Again” (1991) and “I Love You, Man” (2009), the Netflix series “Nobody Wants This” (in 2025) and the HBO series “I Love L.A.” (also 2025). My favorite clip is a chase sequence from a 1971 “Mannix” episode — excruciatingly slow-paced by 2026 standards, and shot long before the FHRA tore out the city’s blacktop median and planted greenery.

Given all of its neighborhood fame, it surprised me to hear how few Angelenos know about the bridge. When Charlie Ryan and Thom Vest started offering LA Explained walking tours early this year, they expected the Disney history would be a popular part of their Los Feliz itinerary, but the bridge quickly emerged as another central element.

Because most of those who sign up for the Los Feliz tour live elsewhere, they have never crossed the bridge “and don’t know it’s there,” Ryan said. “Out of all the tours that I do, it’s the one that brings the most surprise to people.”

An aerial view of the Shakespeare Bridge, formally known as the Franklin Avenue Bridge, in the Franklin Hills area of Los Feliz.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

But plenty of those who live nearby have deep connections with the bridge, including Charley and Shirley Mims, who got married there on Oct. 21, 2000.

To open the ceremony, Shirley strolled from the west end of the bridge to the east, where Charley was waiting. (They still live in the neighborhood and plan to be at the centennial party.)

“When you see the bridge and cross it,” my neighbor Dave McDonald said the other day, “you feel like you’re home. It’s like a welcoming beacon.”

“It’s a real local’s way of getting around,” said Matteo Chizzola, who moved to Los Angeles four years ago and settled in Los Feliz two years ago. Last year, when Chizzola decided to start selling matcha from a sort of grown-up street-corner lemonade stand, he chose a patch of sidewalk at Franklin Avenue and Talmadge Street, two blocks from the bridge.

A jogger crosses the Shakespeare Bridge.

(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)

“It is beautiful and it’s weird. If you go at the right time of day, at sunset, it’s an incredible view,” he said.

Chizzola said he isn’t getting rich running the stand, Fridays through Sundays, but “it has become something that puts a huge smile on my face.”

He’ll be on hand for the bridge’s centennial parade, along with invited local luminaries including Victor the fruit guy (who worked a corner near Marshall High School for more than a decade) and Dora Herrera of the much-loved Yuca’s restaurant on Hillhurst Avenue.

A pedestrian crosses the Shakespeare Bridge,which was completed in 1926.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

Sometimes, when Mary Frances and I are on a neighborhood walk, we stop mid-span. In the distance to the south, you see the downtown skyline. In the arroyo below the bridge (officially the Arroyo de Sacatela) you see the private homes and yards along Monon Street and Myra Avenue. You also see the Los Feliz campus of the International School of Los Angeles (1960), the only school designed by modernist architect John Lautner.

Then there are the decorations. Every few months, in a tradition started by departed neighbor Chris Boutelle, Mary Frances joins a team of FHRA board members and other volunteers who put up hearts for Valentine’s Day, shamrocks for St. Patrick’s Day, Pride and Juneteenth flags in June, American flags and bunting in the lead-up to July 4, and so on.

Most of these costume changes are seamless. But in June 2023, someone tore down the Pride flags. Neighbors quickly replaced them. They came down again. Neighbors replaced them again. The back-and-forth went on for weeks. A suspect was arrested, released, then re-arrested.

Shakespeare Bridge in Los Feliz was the site of controversy in June 2023, when someone repeatedly stole Pride flags from a bridge display. Neighbors replaced the flags and police made an arrest.

(Gary Coronado / Los Angeles Times)

“It was almost every day for a month. People really came together,” said Wallace. The vandal surely didn’t mean to, but Wallace contends that he wound up uniting the neighborhood as never before.

The Oct. 10 bridge celebration, organized by the FHRA, will begin with a noon procession to the bridge from Marshall High School (another neighborhood Gothic Revival landmark), featuring a marching band, several vintage cars and a costumed dog parade.

At the end of that short walk, there’s a party planned from 1-5 p.m. at the end of Monon Street , right under the bridge. There will be snacks, drinks, live music, kid crafts, a bouncy house, a handful of actors in Shakespearean garb and scads of neighbors being neighborly.

I’ll be there for all of it. In times like these, every bridge needs celebrating.

Shakespeare Bridge, formally known as the Franklin Avenue Bridge, spans a ravine in the Franklin Hills with downtown Los Angeles in the background.

(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)

For more than 15 years, Sunday, a Ugandan asylum seeker, has lived in limbo in Japan. Once detained at the Shinagawa immigration centre, he must now regularly report to the authorities and rely on charity to help feed his children.

Changes to Japan’s immigration laws mean he could face deportation. Refusing to be reduced to a statistic, Sunday throws himself into an unlikely project: a samurai film inspired by Yasuke, remembered as Japan’s first Black samurai. For Sunday, filmmaking becomes an act of survival, dignity and hope.

Sunday in Japan is a documentary film by Antonio Rui Ribeiro, Leo Nelki and Golriz Kolahi.

Sept. 30, 2026 3:01 AM PT

Summer mornings in the Hill Tracts region of Bangladesh are a respite from the dissonance of honking cars and construction of the capital city of Dhaka. It was a welcome change to hear chickens and the sound of … wait, was that Julie Andrews’ voice echoing over the hills?

I was visiting my home country when I heard a group of schoolchildren playing ektaras, a traditional string instrument, and singing the “Do-Re-Mi” song for their morning assembly.

I used my phone to show them a picture of Andrews. “Do you know her?” They immediately leaped in excitement. They didn’t know the composer Richard Rodgers or lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II. But they knew Andrews — even though 60 years have passed since “The Sound of Music” and these children live in a remote Bangladeshi village. The recognition is evidence of something extraordinary.

Andrews is turning 91 on Thursday, and there are calls online to bubble wrap her, just in case. She is indeed a global treasure, and she has been earning plaudits and admirers for eight decades.

Andrews trained in the Italian bel canto tradition and from a young age sang challenging coloratura arias with precision, clarity and range. The bright, happy tone, perhaps a subconscious decision rather than anatomical alone, provided her respite from the doodlebug bombs that fell during her childhood in England in World War II. British critics had dubbed her as the “youngest prima donna,” a title usually reserved for opera greats, and it wasn’t undeserved. At just 12, she routinely floated high Fs above the treble staff during live performances.

Yet before opera could claim her, Broadway stepped in. From “The Boy Friend” to “My Fair Lady” and then “Camelot,” she won the hearts of theater goers and creators alike. Lyricist Alan Lerner described her as “an amazingly quick study in music … who meets any challenge with an unabated eyelid that makes you wonder how Britain ever lost the empire.”

Her voice then was so precise that the late maestro André Previn, who led the London Symphony Orchestra, proclaimed: “No one’s diction in any field of singing can come close. … You understand every syllable from the second balcony — I don’t understand how you do that.”

It’s inaccurate to romanticize her legacy in 2026 as simply nostalgic. That would overlook the depth and progressive nature of her characters. She was essentially the first female superhero on the big screen, as Mary Poppins — who could fly and create alternate realities with the snap of her heels, but whose more stunning superpower at the height of the Cold War was to charmingly portray capitalism as dangerous.

In “Victor/Victoria,” she navigated a gender-bending performance that challenged societal norms, playing a woman who impersonates a man impersonating a woman when it was taboo to speak about any layer of that. Her most overlooked and perhaps her best dramatic role was in “Duet for One,” a 1986 film about a musician who suffers from multiple sclerosis. Tragically this became a moment of life imitating art, foreshadowing her own destiny to lose her instrument after throat surgery in 1997.

Rather than retreat, Andrews adjusted and leaned into voice acting with characters like the dominant Queen Lillian in “Shrek” films, Gru’s hilariously villainous mother in “Despicable Me” and the mysterious Lady Whistledown in “Bridgerton,” for which she won an Emmy, twice.

In real life, the flying super governess fought to adopt two babies from Vietnam just after the fall of Saigon, helping to raise awareness of the need for adoptive parents. She then co-founded the Operation USA disaster relief charity and opened the Japanese wing for the United Nations Development Fund for Women.

Whether it was to support UNICEF after the devastating Bhola cyclone hit present-day Bangladesh in 1970 or jetting to Jordan and Senegal to support women’s and children’s activities, she was a quiet champion for the underserved. In her most famous role, in “The Sound of Music,” she was a savior for children being displaced by war.

Andrews is mostly out of the public eye, but her singing is eternal and accessible. YouTube is home to a trove of Andrews performances, including “This Is My Beloved” from “Kismet,” full-voiced “When You Wish Upon a Star,” from pianissimos to fortes, high B-flats and all — her classical skill shines through. These recordings remind us that beyond just the formulaic legato phrasing that singers from the Italian tradition follow, and the clear resonance, her work it set a gold standard for musical storytelling that few have surpassed since.

Julie Andrews is no longer trilling on the Alps, nor is she reprising her role as queen of Genovia in a “Princess Diaries” film, but her voice, and what it represented for more than 80 years, endures. It lives on not just in films and recordings but also ringing in the minds of children and adults alike, from her hometown of Walton-on-Thames to the Hill Tracts of Bangladesh. In an age of doom scrolling (and alarmingly low singing standards), her vast career offers a rare resonance and a continuing masterclass.

Shams-il Arefin Islam, a Yale-Berkeley College associate fellow who works on climate mitigation and adaptation, is a classically trained tenor.