MARY POPPINS
HERE’S WHAT HAPPENED BEHIND THE SCENES OF JULIE ANDREWS’ PRACTICALLY PERFECT CLASSIC
Julie Andrews and other cast members take Closer behind the scenes of the making of the beloved film.
You wouldn’t know it from her confident, Oscar-winning performance, but Julie Andrews was nervous on the set of Mary Poppins. “I was scared to death,” she remembers of her 1964 movie debut. “I knew nothing about filming.”
Everyone else, it seems, had a great time — including Dick Van Dyke, who was blissfully unaware that his Cockney accent was less than convincing as chimney-sweep Bert, the love interest for Julie’s magical nanny. “I was concentrating on the dancing, mostly,” he says. “They had given me a voice coach who turned out to be an Irishman, and his Cockney accent wasn’t much better than mine. During the making of the picture, nobody kidded me about it, but I sure took it afterward.”
Julie didn’t mind. “Dick covered it so wonderfully because his body was so limber and he had such joie de vivre,” she raves. “It doesn’t seem to have harmed the film that much.”
She can say that again. Mary Poppins remains an enduring classic, and now Disney has made a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, which will hit theaters on Dec. 19. The new film’s stars hope to capture the joyful spirit of the original. As Karen Dotrice, who played young Jane Banks, recalls, “Everything you feel when you see the film, that euphoria that people get stepping into this magical world, that’s how we felt.”
JOLLY HOLIDAY
That good feeling filtered down from the top: Walt Disney considered Mary Poppins his beloved pet project and spent a great deal of time visiting the set. “I really enjoyed Uncle Walt — he was such a cool dude,” Karen gushes. “He just treated me and Matthew [Garber, who played young Michael Banks] like his own kids. We started to feel like one big family and that we were all making something fun together that really felt magical.”
The actors were unaware of the struggles Walt went through to convince author P.L. Travers to allow him to film her book. (The backstory was depicted in the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks, with Tom Hanks as Walt and Emma Thompson as P.L.). “You’re far too pretty, of course,” the acerbic
author told Julie after she was cast in the role. “But you’ve got the nose for it.”
In the end, “I don’t think she was as fond of the movie as we all hoped she would be,” Julie says of the writer. “But I’m sure she cried all the way to the bank.”
THE PERFECT NANNY
Julie, 83, became a role model to Karen both on-screen and off. “It was Julie’s day off, but she just popped in to see if I was OK,” the former child actress recalls of one memorable experience. “She said, ‘Let’s just run through the ‘Perfect Nanny’ song.’ I started it and she took me aside, God bless her, and she said, ‘This is a song about a little girl — just be a little girl rather than a miniature opera singer. And we nailed it. It was great!”
Dick, 92, was equally good with his youthful co-stars. “My dad was working, so Dick became a father figure to me,” says Karen. “He was like a big baby — he would muck about on the sidelines and then, as soon as the camera started rolling, put on a straight face. But I’d be piddling myself laughing and couldn’t get myself together, meaning there were many retakes.”
In fact, “There were so many retakes of the ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ scene that we got sick of the toffee apples we were supposed to be eating,” says Karen.
That song, as it turns out, has its own hidden history. Composer Richard Sherman says he and his brother and writing partner, Robert, “had been to summer camp when we were young and had held a contest to find a word longer than ‘antidisestablishmentarianism,’ the longest word in the dictionary.”
But the best moment, Richard says, “came when I first heard Julie singing ‘A Spoonful of Sugar.’ I was crying because she was articulating the whole essence of the movie — which was about the power of love.” Ah, sweet memories! — Bruce Fretts
“I feel so lucky to be the one who got to play her.”
— Julie on Mary Poppins