Julie Andrews on the mixed legacy of being Mary Poppins

The Hollywood star was the embodiment of the enchantress’ nurse when she starred in the 1964 Disney film. In a 1976 interview with the BBC, she said she was defined by Poppins’ sweet, wholesome personality.

Actress Julie Andrews looks up to the sky, wondering how best to answer the question BBC presenter Sue Lawley is about to put to her: whether she feels typecast by the public image shaped by her early success as Mary Poppins.

The 1964 Walt Disney musical, based on a story written by P. L. Travers, premiered in Los Angeles 60 years ago this week and made Andrews famous. Mary Poppins She also helped create the kind, wholesome image that defined her to many, even at the time of that 1976 BBC interview.

The film tells the story of an extraordinary nanny who descends from the London skyline in 1910 with an umbrella to care for the troubled Banks family’s noisy but rather neglected children. Through a series of adventures, using magic and common sense, Mary Poppins helps the family mend relationships and experience the joys of everyday life.

Mary Poppins has been around for a long time. Walt Disney. In the early 1940s, he had promised his daughters, who were fans of the first book, that he would adapt it into a film, but he had no hope of the book’s notoriously difficult author, Travers. He tried repeatedly over the next two decades to convince her to sell him the film rights. By the 1960s, the author’s increasingly poor financial situation forced her to give in, despite Travers’ serious reservations about Disney’s much lighter and more whimsical interpretation of the darker parts of Mary Poppins.

In 2013, Disney made a film depicting the company’s founder’s strained relationship with the stubborn Travers and their efforts to adapt the book. Save Mr BanksIn line with the author’s own concerns about the adaptation of his book, Some critics They argued that the film overly romanticized their rivalry and the complex characters involved.

While Travers portrayed Mary Poppins as a very ordinary character in the books, Disney had a clear idea of ​​who they wanted as a “nearly perfect in every way” nanny – and that person was Julie Andrews.

By this time, Andrews had already enjoyed success on the stage on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in Surrey, England in 1935, Andrews’ mother and stepfather discovered their daughter’s extraordinary singing ability and four-octave range and steered her towards a career in theatre. By the age of 12, she was wowing audiences in London’s West End with her clear, melodious soprano voice. In 1954, she made her US Broadway debut in the hugely popular The Boy Friend, but it was her role as the Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the 1956 musical My Fair Lady that really caught people’s attention. The production was a perfect showcase for her talent, earning her a Tony Award nomination and becoming the highest-grossing musical in Broadway history in 1958.

Disney thought the actress would be perfect for the role of Mary Poppins: after seeing her play Queen Guinevere in the 1962 musical “Camelot,” alongside Richard Burton as King Arthur (for which she was again nominated for a Tony), they went backstage to offer her the lead role in their next production.

“I thought he was just being nice and coming to meet me,” Andrews told BBC’s The One Show in 2014. “But he asked me if I’d be interested in coming to Hollywood to see some designs and hear some songs for a film he was making.”

“I was terrified and I said, ‘Mr. Disney, I’m so happy, I’m so happy, but the truth is, I’m pregnant.’

But Disney was willing to wait patiently to ensure he got what he wanted. “He said OK, we’ll wait,” Andrews said.

The role proved to be her defining one, as she displayed her singing, dancing and comedic talents to the max: her performance brought dignity, warmth and a hint of mystery to the proper nanny, while songs like “A Spoonful of Sugar” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious” showcased Andrew’s effortless charm and flawless voice.

In her second memoir, Home Work, published in 2019, she wrote: “Looking back, I can’t think of a better introduction to film I could have ever had, and learned so much in such a short amount of time. The special effects and animation assignments alone were a massive learning experience that I’ll never have again.”

The film was an innovative mix of live action, animatronics and animation, with children magically transported into paintings and chimney sweeps dancing with penguins. When it premiered in Los Angeles in 1964, audiences gave a spontaneous five-minute standing ovation, and co-star Dick Van Dyke’s unusual Cockney accent both thrilled and bewildered audiences, leaving a lasting mark on the film’s legacy.

Mary Poppins was the number one grossing film in the United States in 1964; the second was My Fair Lady. Despite having played the role of Eliza Doolittle on Broadway, Andrews was passed over for Audrey Hepburn in the film adaptation, ironically because the studio felt she wasn’t a movie star enough. Mary Poppins was nominated for thirteen Academy Awards and won five, including Best Actress for Andrews and Best Original Song for Chim Chim Cher-ee. Andrews also won a BAFTA for her performance.

The following year, she played Maria, a governess, in The Sound of Music, for which she was again nominated for an Academy Award and the film’s worldwide success solidified Andrews’ status as a major Hollywood star.

However, in a very short time, Andrews’s performance as a singing nanny in two hugely successful films cemented her image as a kind and noble character in the minds of audiences.

Over the next few years, she purposefully cast herself in darker dramas such as Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Torn Curtain (1966) and the spy drama The Tamarind Seed (1974), turning down roles that might have reinforced this wholesome image, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Beddecors and Broomsticks (1971). She also sought to subvert her image off screen, as she confessed to André Previn: 1987 BBC interview She once had a bumper sticker on her car that read, “Mary Poppins is a Junkie.”

In 1976 Sue Lawley questioned Andrews at length about whether she was unhappy with her sugar-coated image, and decades later, when Andrews appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Disc 1992.

But while the actress admitted she “wanted to stretch myself” and “do other things,” she said she couldn’t criticize the image because “it was a great film and it gave people so much joy.”

“Have you ever wished you hadn’t done it?” asked Laurie.

“No, not even once,” Andrews said. “To be honest, I get a lot of laughs and a lot of teasing from my family about my image and stuff like that, but I have no regrets whatsoever.”

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