In Sep 1964, right after the completion of The Sound of Music (1965, see entry), that film’s two producers, Robert Wise and Saul Chaplin, invited the star, Julie Andrews, to lunch and offered her the lead in their next musical, a film about the career of British singer-dancer-actress Gertrude Lawrence, who had died a dozen years earlier, in 1952. Wise, who had directed The Sound of Music, would likewise direct the new picture. According to the 19 Dec 1967 DV, Miss Andrews immediately committed to the project, based on nothing more than a verbal outline of the story. News of the film broke when the 3 Nov 1964 DV announced that Andrews, Wise, and Twentieth Century-Fox would “team again” for The Gertrude Lawrence Story, as soon as Andrews completed Hawaii (1966, see entry) and Wise finished directing The Sand Pebbles (1966, see entry). A month later, the 10 Dec 1964 DV noted that Andrews would begin Mrs. A., “the biography of Gertrude Lawrence,” in spring 1966. An item in the 10 Feb 1965 Var noted that, according to Wise, the credits would read: “Robert Wise’s Gertrude Lawrence Story, produced by Saul Chaplin and directed by Robert Wise.” A later item in the 16 Mar 1965 DV added that Charles Maguire would be the associate producer, but he was not included in final credits. The 31 Mar 1965 and 2 Jun 1965 editions of Var mentioned that Wise’s story editor, Max Lamb, would research Gertrude Lawrence’s career in London, England, and that British writers William Fairchild and David Stone would write the original story and screenplay. Fairchild would eventually be the screenwriter of record, but neither Stone nor Lamb was credited in the final film. Rehearsals were set to begin in Jun 1966, with production slated to start two months later, according to the 20 May 1965 DV. Wise expected to shoot most of the picture in England and film interiors at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. The company had already bought the screen rights to two books, Gertrude Lawrence’s autobiography, A Star Danced, and Gertrude Lawrence as Mrs. A, written by her husband, Robert Aldrich, but the purchases were mostly for “the releases which went with them on use of character,” the 30 Jun 1965 Var stated. The production also needed to acquire “rights to various songs, sketches and portions of shows in which Miss Lawrence appeared.” Since Fox already owned the rights to Cole Porter’s score for Nymph Errant, a 1933 British musical written for and starring Miss Lawrence, Wise expected to use some of its songs, but ultimately included only one, “The Physician.” Nine months later, the 23 Mar 1966 DV and other trade magazines floated the idea that Coco Chanel would design Julie Andrews’s "Gertrude Lawrence" wardrobe, but the French fashion designer was ultimately not involved.
       The 31 Mar 1966 DV revealed that the Lawrence “biopic” finally had a real title, Star!, and filming would begin 17 Oct 1966 at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, followed by location work in London, New York, Spain, and the French Riviera. By 6 Apr 1966, Var was quoting Fox that Star! would be the “biggest original musical ever produced in Hollywood.” A studio full-page advertisement in the 30 Aug 1966 DV more grandly called it “the biggest musical film biography ever made.” However, Oct came and went, and at year’s end, the 30 Dec 1966 DV noted, Robert Wise was hoping “to launch” Star! the following week in London, filming in both 70mm color and 35mm black and white, the latter to capture “vintage” scenes in order to “flavor” the picture. The 35mm film would be “optically included on the large frames” of the 70mm stock.
       The 27 Mar 1967 DV announced that pre-recording was starting that day under musical director Lennie Hayton, and shooting would begin 12 Apr 1967. Producer Saul Chaplin had finally cleared the rights to Gertrude Lawrence’s publicly-performed songs through 1941, the year of her Broadway triumph, Lady in the Dark. The film would end with her show-stopping performance of “Jenny” in Lady in the Dark, instead of following through to her 1952 death. Principal photography began on schedule at the Twentieth Century-Fox Studios, the 12 Apr 1967 Var reported, with a 1915 English music hall production number, “Piccadilly,” slated to take five days. In all, the cast and crew filmed at Fox for the first twenty-three days of a 150-day schedule. During the overall production, there would be twenty-four musical numbers, along with 105 studio sets (in addition to locations), and 114 costumes for Andrews alone. Because so many of the songs were written by Cole Porter, George Gershwin, and Noel Coward, the film was expected to have one of Hollywood’s “biggest music budgets.” One song, “Forbidden Fruit,” was the first ever written by Coward, when he was seventeen, and never published. Daniel Massey, the actor portraying Coward, sang it during a scene in which he auditioned for impresario “Andre Charlot.”
       The 16 May 1967 DV and 17 May 1967 Var announced that New York location filming would begin that week, with Andrews, as Gertrude Lawrence, serving coffee on Forty-Fifth Street to patrons lining up to get tickets to her 1938 play, Susan and God. Production numbers were scheduled to be filmed inside four Broadway theaters: the Lyceum (where Andrews would perform “Someone To Watch Over Me”), the Cort, the Belasco, and the Music Box. In more detailed articles in the 18 May 1967 NYT and 25 May 1967 LAT, reporters visited the Cort and Lyceum. At the Cort, the production staged Gertrude Lawrence’s 1940 Broadway triumph, Lady in the Dark. Beginning on 21 May 1968 for a week’s shooting, the Lyceum stood in for the old Imperial Theater where Lawrence starred in George Gershwin’s 1926 Oh Kay. Scenes included Andrews, alone on a darkened stage before an empty house, picking up a rag doll and lip-synching “Someone To Watch Over Me.” Set to follow that scene was a complete production, with orchestra, to be filmed later at Twentieth Century-Fox Studios. Other New York City locations included Central Park, the Algonquin Hotel, and Cartier. Scenes were also set to be filmed at Tibbetts Brook Park in Yonkers, Westchester County, NY, and Mill Neck in Nassau County, Long Island, New York. The production used 2,961 “bit players and extras.” Choreographer Michael Kidd, hired to recreate three decades of theatrical dance from World War I music hall to 1941 Broadway, commuted daily by private airplane between Manhattan and his home in Vermont.
       During rehearsals at the Cort, Andrews expressed the difficulty of trying to be “someone who was loved the world over.” She added, “I never knew Miss Lawrence or saw her perform. Our voices are different, too.” But they had both come up “as youngsters on the vaudeville-music hall-pantomime circuit.”
       From New York, over one hundred members of the cast and crew moved to the town of Dennis on Cape Cod in Massachusetts for a week. Two hundred Cape Cod residents, many of whom knew Gertrude Lawrence from her years of living there, served as extras for scenes filmed at the Cape Playhouse, an eighteenth-century building where the actress met her husband, playhouse manager Richard Aldridge, while she performed there. A wedding scene was filmed nearby at Aldridge’s former home, where the couple’s actual marriage took place on 4 Jul 1940, according to the 30 Jul 1967 LAT.. Richard Aldridge stopped by to “pay his respects” and meet Richard Crenna, the actor portraying him. Although the scene was filmed on a bright sunny day, Aldridge recalled that the real wedding occurred just before midnight during a heavy rain.
       European filming was set to begin 24 Jun 1967 at Cap d’Antibes, on the French Riviera, according to the 24 May 1967 Var. From there, beginning 24 Jun 1967, the production would move to London for three weeks. While part of the crew stayed in London to film early scenes with young actors portraying Lawrence and Coward meeting as adolescents in dramatic school, Wise and Chaplin returned with Julie Andrews to the studio in Los Angeles to rehearse and pre-record seven numbers, the 29 Jun 1967 DV noted. One of the more elaborate, and grueling, numbers was the show-stopping “Jenny” from Lady in the Dark. Andrews told the 6 Nov 1967 LAT that she “studied with a stripper to perfect the incendiary grinds and bumps” required for the number. An item in the 19 Aug 1967 LAT mentioned that Eric Brotherton, a member of the cast of the original 1940 Lady in the Dark, was added to the cast, along with veterans Lionel Ames, Queenie Leonard, and Eric Heath. However, none of them were listed in final credits.
       The completion of a production number of “Limehouse Blues” on 15 Dec 1967 ended principal photography, thirty-eight months and twenty-one days after Julie Andrews agreed to star in the film, the 19 Dec 1967 DV reported.
       Star! had its "royal" world premiere in London on 18 Jul 1968, but Julie Andrews was unable to attend, the 24 Jul 1968 Var reported. Reviews were mixed, but perhaps the pithiest comment, from Robert Ottaway at Sketch, was: “The trouble with the film is that Miss Andrews has many more gifts than Gertie [Lawrence]—but she hasn’t got the magic.”
       When the film opened at Broadway’s Rivoli Theatre in New York on 22 Oct 1968, the 30 Oct 1968 Var pointed out that with its $14 million-plus budget, Star! was “the eighth most expensive film in U.S. film history (and by far the biggest-budgeted pic without a presold title or subject matter).” Another article in the same issue characterized the film’s notices as the type that “infuriate studios.” Many critics found Star! old-fashioned during a time of “upheaval in style and content” at the movies. Newsweek opined that Star “is not impossible to sit through, but neither is a nice long funeral,” and found most of the songs “mediocre or worse.” The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael complained that the filmmakers’ hostility toward Lawrence “just adds unpleasantness to the incompetence.” More positively, perhaps, Saturday Review felt that Andrews “has swallowed up poor Gertrude and turned her into Julie.”
       Star! was nominated for the following Academy Awards: Sound; Music (Score of a Musical Picture—original or adaptation); Art Direction (Art Direction by Boris Leven, Set Decoration by Walter M. Scott and Howard Bristol); Actor in a Supporting Role (Daniel Massey); Costume Design; Cinematography; and, Music (Song—Original for the Picture) for “Star!” (music by Jimmy Van Neusen, lyrics by Sammy Cahn).
       The 14 Jul 1969 DV reported that the film was "doing disappointing business generally.” Ten years later, a 24 Dec 1979 DV obituary for Twentieth Century-Fox president Darryl F. Zanuck more succinctly stated that Star! “laid a b o. egg” and, along with a couple of other musicals, including Dr.Doolittle (1967, see entry) and Hello, Dolly (1969, see entry), effectively ended Zanuck’s reign at the studio.
       As detailed in the 3 Sep 1969 DV and 10 Sep 1969 Var, Twentieth Century-Fox pulled Star! out of release on 1 Jul 1969, trimmed thirty-five minutes of footage, re-titled it Those Were the Happy Times, and scheduled a rerelease for Oct 1969 “with a completely new ad campaign.” Research conducted by a private polling company had found that Andrews’s biggest fans were teenage girls and women in their forties and fifties, all of whom, thanks to the wholesomeness of Mary Poppins (1964, see entry) and The Sound of Music, loved her “warm,” “happy,” and “lovely” image. Accordingly, the re-edited film showed less of her character’s multiple relationships, “easy way with alcohol,” bad language, and “lack of involvement with her young daughter.” The “more risqué songs” were also removed. Nevertheless, upon its rerelease at twenty-three theaters, box office tallies for Those Were the Happy Times were “grim,” according to the 4 Nov 1969 Var.
       The film contains portions of Noel Coward's stage plays Tonight at 8:30 (1935) and Private Lives (1930), and Rachel Crothers's 1937 play, Susan and God.