Julie Andrews' early life wasn't exactly Dickensian. It was, however, filled with trauma, drama and colourful -- often tragic -- characters.

In her immensely readable Home: A Memoir of My Early Years, the Oscar-winning actress, star of the classic Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and Victor Victoria, candidly discusses her parents' divorce, surviving the London Blitz during the Second World War, her mother's turbulent second marriage to a Canadian tenor with a drinking problem and her early musical career, which began when she was 12.

But the memoir is not all angst, as she recounts setting sail at 19 to appear on Broadway in The Boy Friend, which led to her immense success on Broadway in My Fair Lady and Camelot.

Andrews chose the title Home because it was the first comprehensible word she'd said as child.

"My father was driving his second-hand Austin 7; my mother was in the passenger seat beside him holding me on her lap," she writes. "As we approached our modest house, Dad braked the car to turn onto the pocket-handkerchief square of concrete by the gate and apparently I quietly, tentatively, said the word 'Home.' ... The word has carried enormous resonance for me ever since."

Andrews was born Julia Elizabeth Wells on Oct. 1, 1935, at Rodney House, the maternity hospital at Walton-on-Thames, a small town in Surrey in southeastern England.

Her father, Ted Wells, made a meagre salary as a "practical handicrafts teacher." Her pianist mother, Barbara, supplemented their income by giving lessons and performing. Andrews doesn't remember a lot about her mother during her formative years because she was often away performing. That wasn't the case with her father. "He treated me and my siblings as his beloved companions, never dismissing or talking down to us," she writes.

Andrews confesses that she was once asked which parent she hated the most.

It was quickly apparent to her it was her father she loved with all her heart.

"My mother was terribly important to me and I know how much I yearned for her in my youth, but I don't think I truly trusted her," she writes.

In the summer of 1939, her mother met a Canadian tenor named Ted Andrews while doing a series of concert parties at the seaside town. War broke out that fall and in early 1940, he and her mother went off to entertain British troops in France.

"There were two children at home who needed her, but I think the compulsion to go with Ted was overwhelming. ... I think she felt guilty about her decision for the rest of her life," Andrews writes.

Before her mother's divorce was final, she gave birth to a son, Donald. In 1943, her mother married Ted Andrews, and that's when Julia Wells officially became Julie Andrews.

Andrews, who was blessed with a mature larynx, first sang in public at age nine when she performed Come to the Fair with her mother and Pop, as she called Ted Andrews. Three years later, she did her first radio broadcast and debuted in vaudeville musical reviews at London's Hippodrome. Critics dubbed her the "Prodigy With Pigtails!"

She was 14 when her mother asked her to sing at a party at an upper-middle-class house. Afterward, the owner of the house approached her. He seemed intently interested in Andrews, "asking questions almost piercingly."

Later, her mother disclosed that the man was Andrews' biological father, that she'd had an affair with him while married to Wells.

Meanwhile, life at home was increasingly strained. Ted Andrews was having a hard time finding work and began drinking heavily. At 15, Andrews had to stop her schooling; by 17, she was contributing to the family finances.

Andrews' memoir isn't as engrossing once she writes of hitting New York in 1954 because it's just less dramatic. Andrews is happy. She's the toast of Broadway and she marries her longtime beau, production designer Tony Walton.

Home ends at exactly the right time -- in 1963 as she sets out from England with her infant daughter, Emma Kate, and Walton, for Hollywood to make Mary Poppins. Let's hope Andrews doesn't keep her fans waiting long for the next instalment of her memoirs.

Los Angeles Times

Home: A Memoir of My Early Years

By Julie Andrews

(Hyperion, $26.95)