The Hollywood star seemed to be the embodiment of the magical nanny when she starred in the 1964 Disney film. In a 1976 interview with the BBC, she spoke about being influenced by Poppins’ sweet, wholesome personality.

Actress Julie Andrews looks skyward as she ponders how best to answer the question BBC presenter Sue Lawley appears to be trying to force on her: whether she feels pigeonholed into a particular role by the public image she has created as a result of her early success as Mary Poppins.

The 1964 Walt Disney musical, based on stories by PL Travers, made Andrews famous overnight when it premiered in Los Angeles 60 years ago this week. But Mary Poppins had also helped to build the sweet, wholesome image that many people still had of her even at the time of the BBC interview in 1976.

The film tells the story of an extraordinary nanny who descends from the London sky in 1910 with an umbrella and enters the lives of the troubled Banks family to care for their lively, if somewhat neglected, children. Through a series of adventures, with a dose of magic and common sense, Mary Poppins helps repair the family’s relationships and allows them to discover the joy in their everyday lives.

Mary Poppins has long been a passion project for Disney+. In the early 1940s, he had promised his daughters, who were fans of the first book, that he would make a film of it. But he had not reckoned with the notoriously irritable author Travers. He spent the next 20 years repeatedly persuading her to sell him the film rights. In the 1960s, the increasingly dire financial situation of author Travers forced her to relent, despite her serious reservations about Disney’s much lighter, whimsical take on the darker elements of Mary Poppins.

In 2013, Disney portrayed its founder’s contentious relationship with the unyielding Travers and his efforts to bring the book to the screen in the film Saving Mr. Banks – The Rescue. In line with the author’s concerns regarding the adaptation of her own book, some critics claimed that the film was a highly glossed over version of their antagonistic relationship and the two complicated people involved in it.

Although Travers describes Mary Poppins as very plain in the books, Disney had a clear idea of ​​who he wanted to have as his “practically perfect in every way” nanny – and that was Julie Andrews.

By this time, Andrews had already built a successful stage career on both sides of the Atlantic. Born in Surrey, England in 1935, she was discovered by her mother and stepfather, who spotted their daughter’s exceptional singing talent and four-octave vocal range and suggested she pursue a stage career. At 12, she surprised audiences in London’s West End with her clear, melodic soprano voice. She made her U.S. Broadway debut in 1954 in the hugely 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 attention. The production proved the perfect platform for her talent—it was nominated for a Tony Award—and in 1958 it was the highest-grossing Broadway show of all time.

Disney thought the actress would be ideal for his interpretation of Mary Poppins. After seeing her as Queen Guinevere opposite Richard Burton as King Arthur in the 1962 musical Camelot – a role for which she received another Tony nomination – he went backstage to offer her the title role in his next film.

“I thought he was just being nice and coming to visit,” Andrews told BBC’s The One Show in 2014, “but he asked me if I would be interested in coming to Hollywood to see the drafts and hear the songs he was planning for the film he wanted to make.”

“And I was horrified and 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 willing to be patient to make sure he gets what he wants. “He said that’s fine, we’ll wait,” Andrews said.

The role was to be a defining one for her, and allowed her to showcase her singing, dancing and comedy talents. Her performance gave the stuffy nanny authority, warmth and a slightly enigmatic aura, while songs like A Spoonful of Sugar and Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious showcased Andrew’s easygoing charm and flawless voice.

In her second memoir, Home Work, published in 2019, she wrote: “Looking back, I couldn’t have asked for a better introduction to filmmaking, as I learned so much in such a short period of time. The challenges of special effects and animation alone were a steep learning curve, the likes of which I would never experience again.”

The film was an innovative mix of live action, animatronics and animation, in which children could magically jump into pictures and chimney sweeps danced with penguins. When the film premiered in Los Angeles in 1964, audiences erupted into a spontaneous standing ovation that lasted five minutes. People were equally delighted and confused by co-star Dick Van Dyke’s unusual cockney accent, which has become a lasting part of the film’s legacy.

Mary Poppins became the highest-grossing film in the US of 1964, beating out My Fair Lady in second place. Although the role of Eliza Doolittle was originally filmed on Broadway, Andrews was passed over in favour of Audrey Hepburn in the film adaptation because the studio – somewhat ironically in retrospect – did not consider her a movie star. Mary Poppins received 13 Oscar nominations and won five, including Best Actress for Andrews and Best Song for Chim Chim Cher-ee. Andrews also won a Bafta for her performance.

The following year, she received another Oscar nomination for her portrayal of the governess Maria in The Sound of Music, and the film’s worldwide success cemented Andrews’ status as a major Hollywood star.

But the fact that she played two iconic roles as a singing nanny in hugely successful films in such quick succession helped to cement a sweet, virtuous image of Andrews in the public’s mind.

In the years that followed, the actress deliberately sought out darker dramatic projects such as Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller Torn Curtain (1966) and the spy drama The Tamarind Seed (1974), while turning down roles in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (1968) and In Her Drunken Bed (1971) that might have reinforced this wholesome image. And she had also tried to undermine this image off-screen by playing André Previn in a BBC interview 1987 that she once had a sticker on her car that said: Mary Poppins is addicted.

In 1976, Sue Lawley interviewed Andrews at length about whether she was unhappy with her sugary image, and decades later, when Andrew was invited to appear on BBC Radio 4, she asked the same question in a similar vein. Desert Island Discs in 1992.

Although the actress admitted that she had wanted to “go beyond herself” and “do other things,” she said she could not devalue the image because they were “wonderful films that gave people a lot of joy.”

“Do you ever wish you hadn’t done it?” Lawley asked.

“No, never,” said Andrews. “I have to be honest, although I giggle and there is a lot of teasing in the family about my image and things like that. I don’t regret it at all.”

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