AlamyThe Hollywood star seemed to be the embodiment of the magical nanny when she featured in the 1964 Disney film. In a 1976 interview with the BBC, she talked about being defined by Poppins’ sugar-sweet, wholesome persona.
Actress Julie Andrews looks skyward as she ponders the best way to answer the question which BBC presenter Sue Lawley seems determined to press her on – if she feels typecast by the public image formed by her early success as Mary Poppins.
The 1964 Walt Disney musical, which was based on stories written by PL Travers, had brought Andrews overnight fame when it premiered in Los Angeles, 60 years ago this week. But Mary Poppins had also helped create the sweet, wholesome image that, even at the time of the BBC interview in 1976, still defined her for many people.
The film told the story of an extraordinary nanny, who descends from the London skies, umbrella in hand, into the lives of the troubled Banks family in 1910, taking charge of their boisterous, if rather neglected, children. Through a series of adventures, with a dose of magic and common sense, Mary Poppins helps repair the family’s relationships, getting them to embrace the joy in their everyday lives.
Mary Poppins had long been something of a passion project for 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 movie. But he had not counted upon its notoriously prickly author, Travers. He spent the next 20 years repeatedly trying to persuade her to sell him the screen rights. By the 1960s, despite Travers’ serious misgivings about Disney’s much more jolly, whimsical take on the darker elements of Mary Poppins, the author’s increasingly dire financial situation forced her to relent.
In 2013, Disney would depict their founder’s fractious relationship with the intransigent Travers, and his efforts to bring the book to the screen, in the film Saving Mr Banks. In keeping with the author’s fears about the adaptation of her own book, some critics claimed that the film portrayed a highly sanitised version of their antagonistic relationship, and the two complicated people involved.
Despite Travers describing Mary Poppins in the books as being very plain, Disney had a clear idea about who he wanted for the “‘practically perfect in every way'” nanny – and that was Julie Andrews.
A fast-rising talent
By this time, Andrews had already established a successful stage career on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in 1935, in Surrey, in the UK, Andrews’ mother and stepfather, on discovering their daughter’s exceptional singing ability and four-octave vocal range, propelled her towards a career on stage. By the age of 12, she was astonishing West End audiences in London with her clear, melodic soprano voice. In 1954, she made her US debut on Broadway in the immensely popular The Boy Friend, but it was her role as Cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle in the 1956 musical My Fair Lady that really brought her to people’s attention. The production proved to be a perfect showcase for her talents – earning her a Tony Award nomination – and by 1958 was the highest-grossing Broadway show of all-time.
Disney felt the actress would be ideal for his take on Mary Poppins. In 1962, after seeing her perform as Queen Guinevere alongside Richard Burton as King Arthur in the musical Camelot – a role she went on to secure another Tony nomination for – he went backstage to offer her the title role in his upcoming film.
“I thought he was just being nice, and coming to visit,” Andrews told BBC’s The One Show in 2014, “but he asked if I would be interested in coming to Hollywood to see the designs and to hear the songs he was planning for this movie he intended to make.
“And I was horrified, and I said ‘oh Mr Disney, I would love it, I would love it, but I have to tell you, I’m pregnant’.”
But again, Disney was prepared to be patient to ensure he got what he wanted. “He said that’s all right we’ll wait,” said Andrews.
The role would prove to be a defining one for her. It allowed her to demonstrate the full range of her singing, dancing and comedy gifts. Her performance brought authority, warmth and a slightly enigmatic air to the prim nanny, while songs like A Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious showed off Andrew’s easy charm and flawless voice.
In her second memoir, Home Work, published in 2019, she wrote: “In retrospect, I could not have asked for a better introduction to film, in that it taught me so much in such a short period of time. The special effects and animation challenges alone were a steep learning curve, the likes of which I would never experience again.”
The movie was an innovative blend of live-action, animatronics and animation, where children could magically jump into pictures and chimney-sweeps danced with penguins. When it premiered in Los Angeles in 1964, the audience erupted into a spontaneous standing ovation that lasted five minutes. People were left equally exhilarated and bemused by co-star Dick Van Dyke’s unusual take on a cockney accent, which has become an enduring part of the film’s legacy.
Mary Poppins would go on to become the highest-grossing film in the US in 1964. The movie it beat into second place was My Fair Lady. Despite originating the Eliza Doolittle role on Broadway, Andrews had been passed over for the film adaptation in favour of Audrey Hepburn because, somewhat ironically in retrospect, the studio felt she wasn’t a film star. Mary Poppins received 13 Academy Award nominations, winning five, including the best actress Oscar for Andrews and best song for Chim Chim Cher-ee. Andrews also won a Bafta for her performance.
The following year, her portrayal of the governess Maria in The Sound of Music earned her another Oscar nomination and the film’s worldwide success cemented Andrews’ status as a major Hollywood star.
A change of tack
But playing two iconic singing nanny roles in hugely successful movies, so close together, helped solidify a sweet, virtuous image of Andrews in the audience’s minds.
In the years following, the actress purposely sought out darker dramatic projects like Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Torn Curtain (1966) and spy drama The Tamarind Seed (1974), while passing on roles in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) that could have reinforced this wholesome image. And she had attempted to subvert that image off screen as well, admitting to André Previn in a BBC interview in 1987 that she once had a bumper sticker on her car that proclaimed: Mary Poppins Is A Junkie.
In 1976, Sue Lawley questioned Andrews at length about whether she was frustrated with her sugary-sweet image and would go on to quiz her along similar lines decades later, when Andrew was invited on to BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 1992.
But while the actress conceded that she had wished to “extend” herself “and do other things”, she said that she couldn’t knock the image because they were “wonderful films and gave people a lot of pleasure”.
“Do you ever wish you hadn’t done it?” asked Lawley.
“No, never,” said Andrews. “I must be truthful although I do giggle and there is an awful lot of teasing in the family about my image and things like that. I don’t regret it at all.”
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