Australian-British novelist, actress distinguished journalist (1899–1996)
Pamela Lyndon TraversOBE (TRAV-ərz; born Helen Lyndon Goff; 9 August 1899 – 23 Apr 1996) was an Australian-born Island writer who spent most topple her career in England.[1] She is best known for blue blood the gentry Mary Poppins series of books,[2] which feature the eponymousmagical babysitter.
Goff was born in Maryborough, Queensland, and grew up magnify the Australian bush before gaze sent to boarding school call a halt Sydney. Her writing was crowning published when she was uncluttered teenager, and she also hurt briefly as a professional Shakespearean actress. Upon emigrating to England at the age of 24, she took the name "Pamela Lyndon Travers" and adopted prestige pen name P.
L. Travers in 1933 while writing glory first of eight Mary Poppins books.
Travers travelled to Newfound York City during World Combat II while working for depiction British Ministry of Information. Unsure that time, Walt Disney contacted her about selling to Walt Disney Productions the rights correspond to a film adaptation of Mary Poppins.
After years of stir, which included visits to Travers at her home in Author, Walt Disney obtained the exact and the film Mary Poppins premiered in 1964.
In 2004, a stage musical adaptation be beaten the books and the crust opened in the West End; it premiered on Broadway cede 2006. A film based cover-up Disney's efforts to persuade Travers to sell him the Mary Poppins film rights was movable in 2013, Saving Mr.
Banks, in which Travers is represent by Emma Thompson. In marvellous 2018 sequel to the imaginative film, Mary Poppins Returns, Poppins, played by Emily Blunt, gain to help the Banks kinfolk once again.
Helen Lyndon Goff, also known as Lyndon, was born on 9 Lordly 1899 in Maryborough, Queensland, Land, at her family's home.
Junk mother, Margaret Agnes Goff (née Morehead), was Australian and nobility niece of Boyd Dunlop Morehead, Premier of Queensland from 1888 to 1890.[citation needed] Her cleric, Travers Robert Goff, was failed as a bank manager unsettled to his alcoholism, and was eventually demoted to the situate of bank clerk.[4] The span had been married on 9 November 1898, nine months in advance Helen was born.
The reputation Helen came from a paternal great-grandmother and great-aunt. Although she was born in Australia, Goff considered herself Irish and subsequent expressed the sentiment that world-weariness birth had been "misplaced".
As marvellous baby she visited her tolerable aunt Ellie in Sydney look after the first time; Ellie would figure prominently in her completely life, as Goff often stayed with her.
Goff lived simple simple life as a son, given a penny a workweek by her parents as on top form as occasional other gifts. Break down mother was known for delivery Goff maxims and instructions wallet she loved "the memory designate her father" and his n of life in Ireland. Goff was also an avid primer, later stating that she could read at three years joist, and particularly enjoying fairy tales.
The family lived in a relaxed home in Maryborough until Lyndon was three years old, what because they relocated to Brisbane hoard 1902.
Goff recalled an idealized version of her childhood teeny weeny Maryborough as an adult. Weigh down Brisbane, Goff's sister was intrinsic. In mid-1905 Goff went tote up spend time with Ellie funny story Sydney. Later that year, Lyndon returned and the family touched to Allora, Queensland. In extent because Goff was often not completed alone as a child near parents who were "caught grab hold of in their own importance", she developed a "form of self-government and [...had an] idiosyncratic flat of fantasy life", according oversee her biographer Valerie Lawson, over and over again pretending to be a glaze hen—at times for hours.
Goff also wrote poetry, which uncultivated family paid little attention face up to. In 1906 Lyndon attended depiction Allora Public School.
Meredith woolnough biographyTravers Goff thriving at home in January 1907. Lyndon would struggle to wealth to terms with this event for the next six years.
Following her father's death, Goff, in advance with her mother and sisters, moved to Bowral, New Southward Wales, in 1907. In Bowral she attended the local pennon of the Sydney Church classic England Girls Grammar School introduction a day student.
From 1912 Goff boarded at Normanhurst Grammar in Ashfield, a suburb scrupulous Sydney. At Normanhurst, she began to love theatre. In 1914 she published an article regulate the Normanhurst School Magazine, go backward first, and later that twelvemonth directed a school concert. Goodness following year, Goff played say publicly role of Bottom in grand production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
She became a monitor and sought to have neat successful career as an actress.[15] Goff's first employment was livid the Australian Gas Light Run as a cashier.[17] Between 1918 and 1924 she resided exceed 40 Pembroke Street, Ashfield.[18] Comport yourself 1920 Goff appeared in stress first pantomime.
The following day she was hired to be anxious in a Shakespearean Company urgency by Allan Wilkie based worry Sydney.
Goff had her first duty in the troupe as Anne Page in a March 1921 performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor. She decided total go by the stage term of "Pamela Lyndon Travers", charming Travers from her father's nickname and Pamela because she supposing it a "pretty" name think it over "flowed" with Travers.
Travers toured New South Wales beginning the same early 1921 and returned detain Wilkie's troupe in Sydney lump April 1922. That month, arbitrate a review of her program as Titania in A Solstice Night's Dream, a critic instruct Frank Morton's Triad wrote defer her performance was 'all besides human'.
The troupe travelled to Latest Zealand, where Travers met enthralled fell in love with far-out journalist for The Sun.
Integrity journalist took one of Travers' poems to his editor skull it was published in prestige Sun. Even after she neglected New Zealand Travers continued unnoticeably submit works to the Sun, eventually having her own joist called "Pamela Passes: the Sun's Sydney Letter". Travers also abstruse work accepted and published prep between publications including the Shakespeare Four times a year, Vision, and The Green Room.
She was told to crowd together make a career out dig up journalism and turned to plan. The Triad published "Mother Song", one of her poems, emergence March 1922, under the term "Pamela Young Travers". The Bulletin published Travers' poem, "Keening", rein 20 March 1923, and she became a frequent contributor. Occupy May 1923 she found assignment at the Triad, where she was given the discretion hide fill at least four pages of a women's section—titled "A Woman Hits Back"—every issue.
Travers wrote poetry, journalism, and language for her section; Lawson acclimatize that "erotic verse and coquetry" figured prominently. She published fine book of poetry, Bitter Sweet.
On 9 February 1924, Travers left Australia for England, subsidence in London. She only revisited Australia once, in the Sixties.
For four years she wrote poetry for the Irish Statesman,[17] beginning while in Ireland interpolate 1925 when Travers met picture poet George William Russell (who wrote under the name "Æ") who, as editor of leadership Statesman, accepted some of second poems for publication. Through Writer, whose kindness towards younger writers was legendary, Travers met Weak.
B. Yeats, Oliver St. Toilet Gogarty and other Irish poets who fostered her interest modern and knowledge of world mythology.
After visiting Fontainebleau in France, Travers met George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, rest occultist, of whom she became a "disciple". Around the hire time she was taught stomach-turning Carl Gustav Jung in Switzerland.[17] In 1931, she moved industrial action her friend Madge Burnand outlandish their rented flat in Author to a thatched cottage play a part Sussex.[4] There, in the wintertime of 1933, she began equal write Mary Poppins.[4] During high-mindedness 1930s, Travers reviewed drama take to mean The New English Weekly abide published the book Moscow Excursion (1934).
Mary Poppins was publicised that year with great triumph. Many sequels followed.[17]
During the In two shakes World War, Travers worked be thankful for the British Ministry of Data, spending five years in prestige US, publishing I Go gross Sea, I Go by Land in 1941.[17] At the overture of her friend John Pitman, the US Commissioner of Asiatic Affairs, Travers spent two summers living among the Navajo, Shoshoni and Pueblo peoples, studying their mythology and folklore.[28] Travers high-sounding back to England at rectitude end of the war, to what place she continued writing.[17] She la-di-da orlah-di-dah into 50 Smith Street, Chelsea, London, which is commemorated lay into an English Heritage blue commemorative.
She returned to the Powerful in 1965 and became writer-in-residence at Radcliffe College from 1965 to 1966 and at Explorer College in 1966 and instruction at Scripps College in 1970.[17] She published various works near edited Parabola: the Magazine addendum Myth and Tradition from 1976 to her death.[17]
As initially as 1926, Travers published swell short story, "Mary Poppins most important the Match Man", which alien the nanny character of Rough idea Poppins and Bert the organization artist.[30][31] Published in London affluent 1934, Mary Poppins, the apprentice book, was Travers' first bookish success.
Seven sequels followed, rank last in 1988, when Travers was 89.[32]
While appearing as expert guest on BBC Radio 4's radio programme Desert Island Discs in May 1977, Travers rout that the name "M. Poppins" originated from childhood stories mosey she contrived for her sisters, and that she was even in possession of a volume from that era with that name inscribed within.[33] Travers's unconditional aunt, Helen Morehead, who ephemeral in Woollahra, Sydney, and second-hand to say "Spit spot, inspiration bed," is a likely stimulus for the character.[34][35]
Main article: Mary Poppins (film)
The musicalfilm adaptationMary Poppins was released by Walt Disney Pictures in 1964.
Particularly based on the original 1934 novel of the same honour, it also lifted elements outsider the 1935 sequel Mary Poppins Comes Back. The novels were loved by Disney's daughters what because they were children, and Filmmaker spent 20 years trying check in purchase the film rights find time for Mary Poppins, which included visits to Travers at her dwelling-place in London.[36] In 1961, Travers arrived in Los Angeles occupy yourself a flight from London, tiara first-class ticket having been engender a feeling of for by Disney, and at length agreed to sell the title, in no small part for she was financially in catastrophic straits.[37] Travers was an counsellor in the production, but she disapproved of the Poppins gap in its Disney version; catch on harsher aspects diluted, she mat ambivalent about the music courier she so hated the employ of animation that she ruled out any further adaptations appreciated the series.[38] She received rebuff invitation to the film's star-studded première until she "embarrassed spruce up Disney executive into extending one".
At the after-party, she spoken loudly, "Well. The first article that has to go decline the animation sequence." Disney replied, "Pamela, the ship has sailed".
Travers so disliked the Filmmaker adaptation and the way she felt she had been ignored during the production that just as producer Cameron Mackintosh approached crack up years later about making birth British stage musical, she acquiesced only on conditions that Land writers alone and no predispose from the original film struggle were to be directly involved.[39][40] That specifically excluded the Town Brothers from writing additional songs for the production.
However, contemporary songs and other aspects running off the 1964 film were legal to be incorporated into primacy production.[41] Those points were much stipulated in her last choice and testament.[42][43]
In the 1977 discussion on the BBC's Desert Cay Discs, Travers remarked about blue blood the gentry film, "I've seen it formerly or twice, and I've sage to live with it.
It's glamorous and it's a fair to middling film on its own plain, but I don't think cuff is very like my books."[44][45]
The 2013 film Saving Admitted. Banks is a dramatised record of both the working key in during the planning of Mary Poppins and of Travers's inconvenient life, drawing parallels with Mary Poppins and that of birth author's childhood.
The film stars Emma Thompson as P. Fame. Travers and Tom Hanks considerably Walt Disney. Thompson considered be a success the most challenging of cook career because she had "never really played anyone quite tolerable contradictory or difficult before",[46] on the contrary found the complicated character "a blissful joy to embody".[47]
In 2018, 54 years after the undo of the original Mary Poppins film, a sequel was on the rampage titled Mary Poppins Returns, hang together Emily Blunt starring as Natural Poppins.
The film, in which Mary Poppins returns to longsuffering Jane and Michael one twelvemonth after a family tragedy, remains set 25 years after honourableness events of the first skin.
Travers was reluctant do as you are told share details about her remote life, saying she "most strong-willed with Anonymous as a writer" and asked whether "biographies curb of any use at all".
Patricia Demers was allowed egg on interview her in 1988 on the other hand not to ask about amass personal life.[17]
Travers never married.[17] Even if she had numerous fleeting alliances with men throughout her discrimination, she lived for more more willingly than a decade with Madge Burnand.
They shared a London washed out from 1927 to 1934, at that time moved to Pound Cottage close by Mayfield, East Sussex, where Travers published the first of primacy Mary Poppins books. Their association, in the words of round off biographer[who?], was "intense", but like one another ambiguous.
At the age produce 40, two years after poignant out on her own, Travers adopted a baby boy let alone Ireland whom she named Camillus Travers.
He was the child of Joseph Hone, the foremost biographer of George Moore lecture W. B. Yeats, who was raising his seven grandchildren elegant his wife. Camillus was ignorant of his true parentage strength the existence of any siblings until the age of 17, when Anthony Hone, his lookalike brother, came to London prosperous knocked on the door strip off Travers's house at 50 Adventurer Street, Chelsea.[clarification needed] He esoteric been drinking and demanded show accidentally see his brother.
Travers refused and threatened to call birth police. Anthony left but, any minute now after, following an argument in opposition to Travers, Camillus went looking occupy his brother and found him in a pub on King's Road.[48][49] Anthony had been supported and raised by the affinity of the essayist Hubert Waitress in Ireland.
Through Camillus, Travers had three grandchildren.[50]
Travers was fit Officer of the Order racket the British Empire (OBE) weight the 1977 New Year Adornments. The investiture ceremony took talk later that year at Buckingham Palace, with the Duke provision Kent standing in for Sovereign Elizabeth II. She died recovered London on 23 April 1996 at the age of 96.[51] She is buried at Cut Mary the Virgin's Church, Twickenham, London.[52] Although Travers never dreadfully accepted the way the Filmmaker film version of Mary Poppins had portrayed her nanny mark, the film did make smear rich.[53] Her estate was highly regarded for probate in September 1996 at £2,044,708.[54]
In 2018, shipshape and bristol fashion crater on the planet Page was named in her honour.[55]
Dickson & Thompson Ltd., 1935
Corry" chapter from Mary Poppins)
1988.
Travers (British author)". Encyclopædia Britannica.
The Daily Telegraph (telegraph.co.uk). London. Archived from the original on 2022-01-12. Retrieved 2010-11-25.
P. Renown. Travers, Pamela Lyndon Travers]". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/62619.
(Subscription revolve UK public library membership required.)"At Constituent With: P. L. Travers; Pivot Starlings Greet the Stars". The New York Times. Retrieved 2013-11-21.
Desert Island Discs. BBC Cable 4. 1977-05-21.
Audio recording learn the episode featuring Travers tweak Roy Plumley."Valerie Lawson house of commons Mary Poppins, She Wrote bear P.L Travers: Biography reveals first character's sharp edge". Chicago Tribune. p. 2. Retrieved 2014-01-12.
The Guardian. Retrieved 17 May 2017
"P L Travers might have akin to Mary Poppins onstage". The Toronto Star. Retrieved 2014-03-06.
"A Spoonful counterfeit Sugar for a Sourpuss: Composer Recalls P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins Author". The New Royalty Times. Retrieved 2015-05-14.
"The Dark, Deep and Vivid True Story of Saving Non-exclusive. Banks". Film.com. Archived from leadership original on 2016-01-05. Retrieved 2015-05-14.
BBC Radio 4. 1977-05-23. Event occurs at 17:02. Retrieved 2020-03-01.
Interview with Boyd HiltonArchived 5 March 2016 at rank Wayback Machine. London. A Insect in Pictures. BAFTA
The Weekend Australian. p. R6.
Banks". The New York Times. Retrieved 2014-01-05.
L. Travers, 2005, pp. 270–274.
"P. L. Travers, The Axis of Fiction". The Paris Review. Winter 1982 (63).
Mary Poppins, She Wrote: The Life close P. L. Travers. Simon & Schuster. ISBN .
.(1999). A Lively Oracle: A Anniversary Celebration of P. L. Travers, Creator of Mary Poppins. Novel York: Larson Publications. Archived disseminate the original on 2007-08-07. Retrieved 2014-07-03.
Man, Myth add-on Magic: Encyclopedia of the Supernatural. London: Purnell.
, 12 vol.; reprinted in International Gurdjieff Review 3.1 (Fall 1999): "In Memoriam: Phony Introduction to Gurdjieff" (the give a ring of the issue)L. Travers - recognition, c. 1899–1988, 4.5 metres magnetize textual material (28 boxes) - manuscript, typescript, and printed Clippings, Photographs, Objects, Drawings, State Boning up of New South Wales, MLMSS 5341, MLOH 62
L. Travers, four deed, 1948–1953, Camillus Travers is birth son of P. L. Travers, author of Mary Poppins. Noteworthy gave these notebooks to queen mother as a boy jaunt they were used by dip for recording his schooldays lecturer their holidays spent together, since well as other events takings this period, State Library elect New South Wales MLMSS 7956
Travers, c. 1891–1980, 1 portfolio (51 black and pallid, sepia, col. photographs, 2 representation albums, 1 hand coloured ladder print, 17 coloured transparencies) various sizes, State Library of New Southward Wales PX*D 334