This isn’t a huge story, but I found the discussion endearing and genuine. Julie Andrews is promoting the 50-year anniversary DVD edition of The Sound of Music. I guess that explains why Lady Gaga performed the title track at the Oscars last month. Andrews visited Good Morning Britain to talk about the movie, but I’m more interested in her thoughts on marriage. Julie lost her husband, Blake Edwards, in 2010. They were married for 41 years, and she’s still coping with her pain. Marriage feels like a fragile institution at times, and show business is notoriously rough on relationships. Four decades is a major accomplishment.

Julie talked about how she met Blake, which she describes as “literally ships that passed in the night.” They actually shared the same therapist in the 1960s, and Blake often stopped to say hello. They knew each other for a decade before marrying. The secret of their longevity seems too simple to be true:

Her successful marriage: “He sadly passed away about three years ago, but we were married 41 years and it was a love story, it was. Success in our marriage was to take it one day at a time and so, lo and behold, 41 years later there we still were. There are days when it’s perfectly wonderful and I am myself and then it’s suddenly – sock you in the middle of your gut and you think ‘ah God I wish he were here.’ But he is in a way, I think one carries that love always.”

How they met: “We met about 10 years before, literally ships that passed in the night at some event but we actually … our cars, I was going one way and he was going the other, he rolled down the window after smiling a couple of times and he said, ‘Are you going where I just came from?’ I was going to a therapist he was coming from. Very corny, sorry about that.”

[From Good Morning Britain]

Taking it one day at a time sounds deceptively easy but highly effective. Julie and Blake didn’t overanalyze their relationship and stayed in the moment. We should all be so lucky. There’s a common saying that long marriages can survive when two parties never wanted to get divorced at the same time. I don’t know if that was ever the cause with Julie and Blake (probably not), but it’s a bittersweet adage.

Here’s a video clip of Julie talking about how she met Blake.

Photos courtesy of WENN