Julie Andrews
‘Carol Burnett: 90 Years of Laughter + Love’ TV show special premiere, Los Angeles, California, USA – 02 Mar 2023
Most stars of her generation stopped giving interviews about their routines a long time ago. Julie Andrews keeps getting asked, mostly because she keeps showing up: at the Emmys in September, in the voice of Lady Whistledown, in interviews about the books she writes with her daughter. On October 1, she turned 91. And when she was asked recently how she feels, her answer had nothing to do with her age, and everything to do with a habit she picked up long before she ever played Maria von Trapp.
Ninety-one, retired, and still winning
This has been an unusually busy year for a woman who says she has retired. In August, Andrews confirmed she would not appear in the third Princess Diaries film. “I think I’m retired, really,” she told InStyle, explaining that she felt she had had a good run on screen.
A few weeks later, she won the Emmy for Outstanding Character Voice-Over Performance at the 2026 Creative Arts Emmys, for narrating Bridgerton as Lady Whistledown. It was her second consecutive win in the category, and according to Khaleej Times, it made her the oldest woman ever to win a Primetime Emmy. She was 90 at the time.
Why she still feels like she’s in her 50s
Speaking to Yahoo Life this summer, as reported by HELLO!, Andrews said she sometimes feels as though she is still in her 50s. Asked what has kept her going, she pointed to something unglamorous: for most of her life, she has worked out first thing in the morning. She admitted it is “a little less so these days,” but the habit has never really gone away.
It started with the stage. Preparing for a run at the London Palladium as a young performer, she took brisk walks that included hills and steep inclines, to build the stamina and leg strength that live theater demands. Decades later, on The Rosie O’Donnell Show in 1996, she described a morning session of about 45 minutes of stretching, aerobics and ballet barre. “All the things I know work for me,” she said.
Why did she start doing less?
The most interesting part of the story is what Andrews did next. Instead of pushing harder as she got older, she cut back on purpose. Her stated goal became to “work out as little as I can for as much gain as I can.” In practice, that meant yoga and a little ballet, for 30 to 40 minutes every other day. Not for a role, she has said, but simply to stay supple.
It is the same quiet logic behind Helen Mirren’s 12-minute routine: a short, repeatable habit that survives the decades because it never asks for too much.
What science says about her habit
Brisk walking, the backbone of her stage years, is one of the most studied forms of exercise. In a study of nearly 475,000 adults published in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2019, researchers at the University of Leicester found that women who described themselves as brisk walkers had an estimated life expectancy of 86.7 to 87.8 years, compared with 72.4 years for slow walkers. The study was observational, so it does not prove that walking faster adds years, but the gap held regardless of body weight.
Her later choice of yoga and ballet also lines up with official guidance. The CDC recommends that adults over 65 combine 150 minutes of moderate activity a week with muscle-strengthening work on at least two days, and add activities that improve balance. A barre and a yoga mat cover the last two.
How to borrow her approach
You do not need a Palladium contract to copy the principle. If you want to start the way Julie Andrews did, a few rules stand out:
- Do it first thing in the morning, before the day has a chance to cancel it.
- Walk briskly, at a pace where talking is possible but singing is not, and look for a hill.
- Add something for balance and flexibility, such as yoga or a few barre exercises at the kitchen counter.
- As the years go by, aim for less effort for the same gain, not more effort for diminishing returns.
If you need a starting point at home, Jennifer Aniston’s home workout follows the same short and simple philosophy.
The bottom line
At 91, Julie Andrews has retired from the screen, not from her mornings. The habit she credits is not a secret formula. It is a walk, a stretch and a barre, started decades ago and scaled down, never abandoned. That may be the real reason she still feels decades younger than the date on her birth certificate.
