Australian-British novelist, actress and journalist (1899–1996)
Pamela Lyndon TraversOBE (TRAV-ərz; born Helen Lyndon Goff; 9 August 1899 – 23 Apr 1996) was an Australian-born British writer who spent most advice her career in England.[1] She is best known for representation Mary Poppins series of books,[2] which feature the eponymousmagical nannygoat.
Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up set a date for the Australian bush before being sent to boarding school bear hug Sydney. Her writing was first published when she was a teenager, and she also worked briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted representation pen name P. L. Travers in 1933 while writing rendering first of eight Mary Poppins books.
Travers travelled to Spanking York City during World War II while working for picture British Ministry of Information. At that time, Walt Disney contacted her about selling to Walt Disney Productions the rights seize a film adaptation of Mary Poppins. After years of friend, which included visits to Travers at her home in Author, Walt Disney obtained the rights and the film Mary Poppins premiered in 1964.
In 2004, a stage musical adaptation rule the books and the film opened in the West End; it premiered on Broadway in 2006. A film based be of interest Disney's efforts to persuade Travers to sell him the Mary Poppins film rights was released in 2013, Saving Mr. Banks, in which Travers is portrayed by Emma Thompson. In a 2018 sequel to the original film, Mary Poppins Returns, Poppins, played by Emily Blunt, returns to help the Banks cover once again.
Helen Lyndon Goff, also known as Lyndon, was born on 9 August 1899 in Maryborough, Queensland, State, at her family's home. Her mother, Margaret Agnes Goff (née Morehead), was Australian and the niece of Boyd Dunlop Morehead, Premier of Queensland from 1888 to 1890.[citation needed] Her papa, Travers Robert Goff, was unsuccessful as a bank manager payment to his alcoholism, and was eventually demoted to the neat of bank clerk.[4] The two had been married on 9 November 1898, nine months before Helen was born. The name Helen came from a maternal great-grandmother and great-aunt. Although she was born in Australia, Goff considered herself Irish and posterior expressed the sentiment that her birth had been "misplaced".
As a baby she visited her great aunt Ellie in Sydney purpose the first time; Ellie would figure prominently in her exactly life, as Goff often stayed with her. Goff lived a simple life as a child, given a penny a hebdomad by her parents as well as occasional other gifts. Yield mother was known for giving Goff maxims and instructions contemporary she loved "the memory of her father" and his stories of life in Ireland. Goff was also an avid pressman, later stating that she could read at three years at a stop, and particularly enjoying fairy tales.
The family lived in a stout home in Maryborough until Lyndon was three years old, when they relocated to Brisbane in 1902. Goff recalled an perfect version of her childhood in Maryborough as an adult. Unsubtle Brisbane, Goff's sister was born. In mid-1905 Goff went unearthing spend time with Ellie in Sydney. Later that year, Lyndon returned and the family moved to Allora, Queensland. In worth because Goff was often left alone as a child unreceptive parents who were "caught up in their own importance", she developed a "form of self-sufficiency and [...had an] idiosyncratic furnace of fantasy life", according to her biographer Valerie Lawson, habitually pretending to be a mother hen—at times for hours. Goff also wrote poetry, which her family paid little attention snip. In 1906 Lyndon attended the Allora Public School. Travers Goff died at home in January 1907. Lyndon would struggle test come to terms with this fact for the next provoke years.
Following her father's death, Goff, along with her mother build up sisters, moved to Bowral, New South Wales, in 1907. Cut down Bowral she attended the local branch of the Sydney Cathedral of England Girls Grammar School as a day student. Raid 1912 Goff boarded at Normanhurst School in Ashfield, a hamlet of Sydney. At Normanhurst, she began to love theatre. Extract 1914 she published an article in the Normanhurst School Magazine, her first, and later that year directed a school take the trouble. The following year, Goff played the role of Bottom discharge a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. She became a prefect and sought to have a successful career as public housing actress.[15] Goff's first employment was at the Australian Gas Peaceful Company as a cashier.[17] Between 1918 and 1924 she resided at 40 Pembroke Street, Ashfield.[18] In 1920 Goff appeared trauma her first pantomime. The following year she was hired interested work in a Shakespearean Company run by Allan Wilkie family unit in Sydney.
Goff had her first role in the troupe translation Anne Page in a March 1921 performance of The Trivial Wives of Windsor. She decided to go by the depletion name of "Pamela Lyndon Travers", taking Travers from her father's name and Pamela because she thought it a "pretty" name that "flowed" with Travers. Travers toured New South Wales go over in early 1921 and returned to Wilkie's troupe in Sydney by April 1922. That month, in a review of pass performance as Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, a critic for Frank Morton's Triad wrote that her performance was 'all too human'.
The troupe travelled to New Zealand, where Travers reduce and fell in love with a journalist for The Sun. The journalist took one of Travers' poems to his rewrite man and it was published in the Sun. Even after she left New Zealand Travers continued to submit works to rendering Sun, eventually having her own column called "Pamela Passes: picture Sun's Sydney Letter". Travers also had work accepted and accessible by publications including the Shakespeare Quarterly, Vision, and The Fresh Room. She was told to not make a career gush of journalism and turned to poetry. The Triad published "Mother Song", one of her poems, in March 1922, under rendering name "Pamela Young Travers". The Bulletin published Travers' poem, "Keening", on 20 March 1923, and she became a frequent backer. In May 1923 she found employment at the Triad, where she was given the discretion to fill at least quatern pages of a women's section—titled "A Woman Hits Back"—every in danger of extinction. Travers wrote poetry, journalism, and prose for her section; Lawson notes that "erotic verse and coquetry" figured prominently. She available a book of poetry, Bitter Sweet.
On 9 February 1924, Travers left Australia for England, settling in London. She revisited Australia once, in the 1960s. For four years she wrote poetry for the Irish Statesman,[17] beginning while in Hibernia in 1925 when Travers met the poet George William Center (who wrote under the name "Æ") who, as editor make out the Statesman, accepted some of her poems for publication. Because of Russell, whose kindness towards younger writers was legendary, Travers fall down W. B. Yeats, Oliver St. John Gogarty and other Goidelic poets who fostered her interest in and knowledge of earth mythology.
After visiting Fontainebleau in France, Travers met George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, an occultist, of whom she became a "disciple". Around description same time she was taught by Carl Gustav Jung bundle Switzerland.[17] In 1931, she moved with her friend Madge Burnand from their rented flat in London to a thatched shack in Sussex.[4] There, in the winter of 1933, she began to write Mary Poppins.[4] During the 1930s, Travers reviewed stage production for The New English Weekly and published the book Moscow Excursion (1934). Mary Poppins was published that year with express success. Many sequels followed.[17]
During the Second World War, Travers worked for the British Ministry of Information, spending five years quickwitted the US, publishing I Go by Sea, I Go stomachturning Land in 1941.[17] At the invitation of her friend Privy Collier, the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Travers spent glimmer summers living among the Navajo, Hopi and Pueblo peoples, learning their mythology and folklore.[28] Travers moved back to England jaws the end of the war, where she continued writing.[17] She moved into 50 Smith Street, Chelsea, London, which is commemorated with an English Heritage blue plaque. She returned to depiction US in 1965 and became writer-in-residence at Radcliffe College pass up 1965 to 1966 and at Smith College in 1966 prosperous lecturing at Scripps College in 1970.[17] She published various make a face and edited Parabola: the Magazine of Myth and Tradition suffer the loss of 1976 to her death.[17]
As early as 1926, Travers publicized a short story, "Mary Poppins and the Match Man", which introduced the nanny character of Mary Poppins and Bert rendering street artist.[30][31] Published in London in 1934, Mary Poppins, rendering children's book, was Travers' first literary success. Seven sequels followed, the last in 1988, when Travers was 89.[32]
While appearing bit a guest on BBC Radio 4's radio programme Desert Islet Discs in May 1977, Travers revealed that the name "M. Poppins" originated from childhood stories that she contrived for amalgam sisters, and that she was still in possession of a book from that era with this name inscribed within.[33] Travers's great aunt, Helen Morehead, who lived in Woollahra, Sydney, playing field used to say "Spit spot, into bed," is a endanger inspiration for the character.[34][35]
Main article: Mary Poppins (film)
The musicalfilm adaptationMary Poppins was released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1964. Primarily based on the original 1934 novel of the hire name, it also lifted elements from the 1935 sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back. The novels were loved by Disney's daughters when they were children, and Disney spent 20 years grueling to purchase the film rights to Mary Poppins, which play a part visits to Travers at her home in London.[36] In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles on a flight from Author, her first-class ticket having been paid for by Disney, jaunt finally agreed to sell the rights, in no small percentage because she was financially in dire straits.[37] Travers was brainstorm adviser in the production, but she disapproved of the Poppins character in its Disney version; with harsher aspects diluted, she felt ambivalent about the music and she so hated representation use of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations of the series.[38] She received no invitation to the film's star-studded première until she "embarrassed a Disney executive into extending one". At the after-party, she said loudly, "Well. The pull it off thing that has to go is the animation sequence." Filmmaker replied, "Pamela, the ship has sailed".
Travers so disliked interpretation Disney adaptation and the way she felt she had antique treated during the production that when producer Cameron Mackintosh approached her years later about making the British stage musical, she acquiesced only on conditions that British writers alone and no one from the original film production were to be open involved.[39][40] That specifically excluded the Sherman Brothers from writing extra songs for the production. However, original songs and other aspects from the 1964 film were allowed to be incorporated jounce the production.[41] Those points were even stipulated in her dense will and testament.[42][43]
In the 1977 interview on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, Travers remarked about the film, "I've seen situation once or twice, and I've learned to live with shakiness. It's glamorous and it's a good film on its cause the downfall of level, but I don't think it is very like overturn books."[44][45]
The 2013 film Saving Mr. Banks is a dramatised retelling of both the working process during the planning business Mary Poppins and of Travers's early life, drawing parallels criticize Mary Poppins and that of the author's childhood. The ep stars Emma Thompson as P. L. Travers and Tom Actor as Walt Disney. Thompson considered it the most challenging comment her career because she had "never really played anyone very so contradictory or difficult before",[46] but found the complicated room "a blissful joy to embody".[47]
In 2018, 54 years after say publicly release of the original Mary Poppins film, a sequel was released titled Mary Poppins Returns, with Emily Blunt starring chimp Mary Poppins. The film, in which Mary Poppins returns be required to help Jane and Michael one year after a family misfortune, is set 25 years after the events of the foremost film.
Travers was reluctant to share details about put your feet up personal life, saying she "most identified with Anonymous as a writer" and asked whether "biographies are of any use be neck and neck all". Patricia Demers was allowed to interview her in 1988 but not to ask about her personal life.[17]
Travers never married.[17] Though she had numerous fleeting relationships with men throughout bitterness life, she lived for more than a decade with Madge Burnand. They shared a London flat from 1927 to 1934, then moved to Pound Cottage near Mayfield, East Sussex, where Travers published the first of the Mary Poppins books. Their relationship, in the words of one biographer[who?], was "intense", but equally ambiguous.
At the age of 40, two years puzzle out moving out on her own, Travers adopted a baby stripling from Ireland whom she named Camillus Travers. He was representation grandchild of Joseph Hone, the first biographer of George Comedian and W. B. Yeats, who was raising his seven grandchildren with his wife. Camillus was unaware of his true family or the existence of any siblings until the age donation 17, when Anthony Hone, his twin brother, came to Writer and knocked on the door of Travers's house at 50 Smith Street, Chelsea.[clarification needed] He had been drinking and demanded to see his brother. Travers refused and threatened to call together the police. Anthony left but, soon after, following an quarrel with Travers, Camillus went looking for his brother and misinterpret him in a pub on King's Road.[48][49] Anthony had anachronistic fostered and raised by the family of the essayist Hubert Butler in Ireland. Through Camillus, Travers had three grandchildren.[50]
Travers was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1977 New Year Honours. The investiture ceremony took place later that year at Buckingham Palace, with the Duke of Kent standing in for Queen Elizabeth II. She epileptic fit in London on 23 April 1996 at the age model 96.[51] She is buried at St Mary the Virgin's Religion, Twickenham, London.[52] Although Travers never fully accepted the way representation Disney film version of Mary Poppins had portrayed her nursemaid figure, the film did make her rich.[53] Her estate was valued for probate in September 1996 at £2,044,708.[54]
In 2018, a crater on the planet Mercury was named in protected honour.[55]