Trailer
Plot summary
In Edwardian London, Winifred Banks comes home from a suffragette rally to learn that Jane and Michael have run off again and that their nanny, Katie Nanna, has quit. Her husband George, a strict and ambitious banker, advertises for a stern nanny. The children write their own advertisement asking for someone kind, and George tears it up, but a wind lifts the scraps up the chimney. The next day a gust blows away the waiting applicants, and Mary Poppins descends under an open umbrella, carrying the children's mended letter. She agrees to be firm with them and takes the post, then magically tidies the nursery. Bert, a street painter who turns his hand to many trades, joins them on outings, and the three step into one of his chalk drawings.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mary Poppins (1964)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Julie Andrews was making her feature film debut, given the role of Mary Poppins soon after Jack L. Warner passed her over and replaced her with Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, even though Andrews had originated that role on Broadway.
- Andrews later beat Hepburn for Best Actress at the Golden Globes for their respective roles, and went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress for Mary Poppins, a category in which Hepburn was not nominated at all.
- Rather than bluescreen, the actors were filmed against a white screen lit by yellow sodium vapor lights, with a prism-fitted camera filtering that light onto a separate reel to create a matte so accurate it let background light through Mary Poppins's veil. The film won the 1965 Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
- Walt Disney used his huge profits from the film to purchase land in central Florida and finance the construction of Walt Disney World.
- In February 2024 the British Board of Film Classification reclassified Mary Poppins from U to PG, because of Admiral Boom's use of the word "hottentot" to refer to the dancing chimney sweeps.
- Dick Van Dyke had trouble with Bert's Cockney accent even with coaching from English character actor J. Pat O'Malley; his attempt is considered one of the poorer accents in film history and came second in a 2003 Empire magazine poll of the worst film accents.
- Walt Disney first attempted to purchase the film rights from P. L. Travers as early as 1938, but Travers repeatedly refused, because she did not believe a film version would do justice to her books.
- The three singing Cockney geese in the "Jolly Holiday" sequence were all voiced by Marni Nixon, who regularly sang for actresses with substandard singing voices and later provided the singing voice for Hepburn in My Fair Lady.
Stills
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