The lovely and lively Emma Thompson is hardly the first actress you would consider to play the terse author of Mary Poppins.
Sure, Thompson managed a successful variation on the fantasy persona of Poppins as Nanny McPhee. But her latest role is in sharp contrast.
Still, the 54-year-old said she couldn't wait to portray curmudgeonly P.L. Travers in Saving Mr. Banks, which details the fractious behindthe-scenes making of the iconic 1964 Mary Poppins Disney movie musical. The movie opens Thursday in Edmonton.
The comedy-drama also features Tom Hanks portraying Walt Disney and Colin Farrell defining Travers's alcoholic banker father, recalled in flashbacks and showing the writer's difficult childhood in Australia.
Rounding out the cast is Paul Giamatti ,who plays Travers's kindly L.A. limousine driver. Jason Schwartzman and B.J. Novak portray the Chim Chim Cher-ee Sherman Brothers songwriting team.
Bradley Whitford is the diplomatic Mary Poppins screenwriter.
In the Australian part of the movie (filmed just outside of L.A.), there is Farrell as the father. Ruth Wilson portrays the writer's long-suffering mother and Annie Buckley is Travers as an impressionable child.
Hanks and Farrell are key to the narrative, but it is Thompson who shines in an Oscar-worthy performance as the laconic scold. She is nominated for a Golden Globe and a Screen Actors Guild award for the role.
"Is it not rather nice for all of us, who have been well brought up and always so bloody polite, to see someone being rude," said Thompson at a Beverly Hills hotel suite promoting Saving Mr. Banks. "It's bliss, isn't it?" As illustrated in the John Lee Hancock-directed movie, Disney only felt frustration negotiating the Mary Poppins film rights with Travers, a.k.a. Helen Goff. The snobbish London-based writer had rejected Disney for 20 years before some financial setbacks in the early 1960s forced her to reconsider.
That's why she accepted an invitation from Disney to observe a two-week Mary Poppins pre-production session at the Disney Studios in Burbank, Calif.
To her dismay, as detailed in the movie, Disney had transformed the material into a playground of music and dance, so cue the confrontations.
For her part, Thompson prepared for the role by researching her subject as well as reading Travers series of Mary Poppins books. She also decided to perm her hair into tight curls to emphasize Travers's stilted look.
The wickedly witty delivery is all Thompson, however. After all, she's enjoyed an impressive multifaceted career as an accomplished Oscar-winning writer (Sense and Sensibility) and performer (Howard's End).
Indeed, there is a darker side to Travers, underscored by her complicated and contradictory relationship with her drunkard dad, who seems to have inspired creativity in his daughter at an early age. As the film indicates, her unresolved childhood issues inform the Mary Poppins themes, not to mention the writer's prickly attitude toward Disney and his proposed movie.
The film was born from Ian Collie's 2002 Australian TV documentary The Shadow of Mary Poppins. It's a telling portrait of the author who was born and raised in Queensland, Australia, but who reinvented herself as a London writer.
Successful Aussie screenwriter Sue Smith fashioned a screenplay based on the documentary but focused on the clash between Disney and Travers. Later, American screenwriter Kelly Marcel refined it even more.
It was the many personality flaws of the children's book author that intrigued the actress.
"She is a rather extraordinary combination of things," Thompson said. "I suppose that was the scary thing about playing her. In film, we often get to play someone who is emotionally or morally consistent in some way, and she was not consistent in any way."
Mary Poppins became a hit movie and earned 13 Academy Award nominations, winning a best actress Oscar for Julie Andrews, who played Poppins, and best score and song (Chim Chim Cher-ee) Oscars for the Sherman Brothers.
The author never admitted she approved of the Disney translation of Mary Poppins, but the person who played her is convinced Travers was aware of her place in the world of entertainment.
"She was always like, 'I don't want people to know anything about me'," said Thompson.
"But she kept everything she wrote and eventually sent it to the archives. She really felt she was an important contributor to the culture."
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