Behind The Scenes Of Mary Poppins: The Magical Journey

You’d never guess it from her confident, Oscar-winning performance, but Julie Andrews was actually pretty nervous when she stepped onto the set of Mary Poppins. "I was scared to death," she has admitted about her 1964 movie debut. "I knew nothing about filming. It was a whole new world for me, and I was stepping into it with a lot of uncertainty."

Despite Julie’s nerves, everyone else seemed to be having the time of their lives, especially Dick Van Dyke. He was blissfully unaware that his Cockney accent as chimney-sweep Bert was less than convincing. "I was concentrating on the dancing, mostly," he recalls. "They gave me a voice coach who, it turns out, was Irish. His Cockney accent wasn’t much better than mine. Nobody said anything about it during the filming, but I definitely heard about it afterward." Dick’s charm and talent more than made up for any accent mishaps, and the audience loved it.

Julie didn’t mind Dick’s accent at all. "Dick covered it wonderfully because his body was so limber and he had such joie de vivre," she gushes. "It doesn’t seem to have harmed the film that much. In fact, it added to its charm." The film's success speaks for itself, and now Disney has brought us a sequel, Mary Poppins Returns, which continues to capture the magic of the original.

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Karen Dotrice, who played young Jane Banks, sums it up beautifully: "Everything you feel when you see the film, that euphoria that people get stepping into this magical world, that’s how we felt. It was like living a dream."

The Magic Starts at the Top

That sense of magic filtered down from the top, thanks to Walt Disney himself. Mary Poppins was his beloved pet project, and he spent a great deal of time visiting the set. "I really enjoyed Uncle Walt — he was such a cool dude," Karen recalls fondly. "He treated me and Matthew [Garber, who played young Michael Banks] like his own kids. We started to feel like one big family, making something fun together that really felt magical."

What the cast didn’t know at the time was the struggle Walt went through to convince author P.L. Travers to let him film her book. This backstory was later depicted in the 2013 movie Saving Mr. Banks, starring Tom Hanks as Walt and Emma Thompson as P.L. Travers. Despite the author’s initial reluctance, she eventually gave her approval. "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." While P.L. may not have been as fond of the movie as everyone hoped, you can bet she appreciated the financial success it brought her.