BEST-SELLING FILM AND LEGACY THAT ENDURES Why Mary Poppins is still magical 60 years on ...in the most delightful way
EXCLUSIVE SIX decades have passed since Julie Andrews promised a spoonful of sugar would help the medicine go down and Mary Poppins is as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious as ever.
Walt Disney’s film about a magical nanny who flies in to tame wayward children Michael and Jane but ends up fixing all of the dysfunctional Banks family’s problems was the biggest movie of 1964.
It won five Oscars and netted $100million (£80m) at the box office, helping finance the opening of Walt Disney World in Florida.
Since then, it has delighted generations of children with songs including Let’s Go Fly a Kite and Chim Chim Cher-ee.
And more than half a century on, its appeal endures.
A 2018 sequel was also a hit, while 100 cinemas across the UK have screened the original film to marks its 60th anniversary and a Mary Poppins stage production begins a tour in November.
Yet the film that has delighted millions nearly did not get made.
Hellcat
Author PL Travers – the creator of Mary Poppins – refused to give Walt Disney the film rights as she feared her character being turned into a cartoon.
After a 20-year battle with the studio she conceded but was said to have thought that Andrews – who won a best actress Oscar in the film – was “far too pretty” for the role.
Composer Richard Sherman likened his fortnight of working with “hellcat” Ms Travers to “having two weeks of ulcers”. Even after the premiere, the author – who died in 1996, aged 96 – declared: “The animation sequence has to go.”
Walt paid no heed and one of the last films to be produced by him, it had a $6m (£4.8m) budget – the studio’s largest at that time.
He was so determined to cast Britishborn Andrews – a stage actress spotted in Camelot on Broadway – as Mary that when she turned the role down due to being pregnant, he postponed production until 1963, when her daughter Emma was six months old, to accommodate her.
Andrews and Dick Van Dyke as chimney sweep Bert brought stardust to the story of an enigmatic nanny who arrives in Edwardian London in 1910 to reunite the Banks family through kindness, order and routine – plus a big dose of fun.
Time magazine wrote: “The sets are luxuriant, the songs lilting, the scenario witty but impeccably sentimental and the supporting cast only a pinfeather short of
Mary’s not too sweet, she has a hard aspect. It has honesty combined with wonder & magic
perfection.” But despite its huge success, Travers blocked a follow-up – even including a clause in her will banning Americans from any future Poppins projects.
However, her estate approved the 2018 sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, starring British actress Emily Blunt as Mary and a 93-yearold Dick Van Dyke as Mr Dawes Jr.
Picking up 24 years on, with an adult Michael and Jane, the film, directed by Rob Marshall, made $350m (£280m) at the box office.
Leading a team of 70 artists on the sequel – including many who came out of retirement especially – Jim Capobianco chose to use oldschool 2D animation to honour the original. He said: “There’s a certain
magic to Mary Poppins. There’s something special in this nanny who cares so much about her children but it’s also very nice she’s so dimensional.
“She’s not just sweet, she has a hard aspect. It has honesty that combined with wonder and magic is really important.”
Andrews refused a $1m (£800,000) offer to return but was “1,000%” in
support, saying: “This is Emily’s show. I don’t want it to be, ‘Oh here comes that Mary Poppins’.”
Van Dyke, now 98, relished the chance to perfect his often-mocked Cockney accent, which he once admitted was “the most atrocious accent in the history of cinema”.
He said: “People in the UK ask what part of England I was meant to be from and I say ‘A little shire in the North where most of the people were from Ohio.’” British costume designer Sandy Powell said working with the star was a joy.
“He was so sharp. I fitted him at his LA home. He was so sprightly and charming,” she said. “His only costume demand was he wanted to wear his own dance shoes. He’s an old-school professional.”
Oscar-winner Powell loved the original film so much she agreed to work on the sequel before even reading the script. She was tasked with re-creating Mary’s signature cloak, which had to be iconic but also reflect the passing of time, as the sequel is set in 1934.
She said: “Mary’s silhouette was so important as we all know the image of her coming out of the clouds with her umbrella in that longline Edwardian coat.”
There was a blow to the Poppins magic earlier this year, when the British Board of Film Classification changed the age rating of the original film from U to PG as it refers to soot-faced chimney-sweeps as “Hottentots”, which is now considered to be racially derogatory.
Fortunately, the rest of the film is still seen as good old-fashioned fun.
As Andrews, 88, puts it: “It was one of the perfectly crafted Hollywood movies, full of joy and love and family and adventure.”