Steely, self-centred, controlling — the Mary Poppins I knew

PAMELA Lyndon Travers, author of Mary Poppins, would not, I think, have been best pleased with Emma Thompson’s reincarnation of her in Saving Mr Banks.

I think she would have hated the new movie as much as she disliked the original Disney film of Mary Poppins. The story had been coarsened, “Disneyfied”, she said. To have her long spat with Walt Disney over the film rights resurrected so publicly would probably have annoyed her even more.

The new film would have been better titled Looking for Mr Banks, for that was the driving force in her life and of her writing: looking for her father, Travers, whom she had dearly loved but who, at the age of 8, she had lost.