Andrews stepped in as one of Gru’s biggest foils Although Gru’s mom isn’t exactly the warm and fuzzy type, the Dietrich vibes help make her an excellent whip for an aspiring supervillain. “She’s maybe the worst mother you could possibly encounter,” Andrews said of her Despicable Me and Minions: The Rise of Gru character. For Andrews, that appears to be the point. Most of Dietrich’s characters-often considered femme fatales-were not the typical mother figure routinely shown by Hollywood at the time. Dietrich’s brazen and self-assured persona proved more than an on-screen match for some of the biggest male stars of her day, including John Wayne, Jimmy Stewart, and Gary Cooper. While Andrews was dubbing animated foreign films as a 15-year-old (per the Vanity Fair interview), Dietrich was an international movie star known for domineering performances. In a recent interview with Vanity Fair on YouTube, Andrews called her character (the mother of protagonist, Gru) “such a terrible woman, and so full of herself.” Elaborating further, Andrews said, “So, I thought she would think of herself as kind of a Marlene Dietrich.”ĭietrich was an enormous figure in Hollywood by the time Andrews was getting her start at the end of the 1940s. After being asked to pick the name of her character for Despicable Me, Julie Andrews turned to Hollywood’s golden age for inspiration. When you’re an Oscar-winning legend, sometimes you get to do things like name your own characters.

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