Mary Poppins World Premiere at Grauman's Chinese Theatre, August 27, 1964

Walt Disney's Mary Poppins had its world premiere on August 27, 1964, at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, adapted from Pamela Lyndon Travers's 1934 novel. The film won five Academy Awards — Best Actress, Best Film Editing, Best Visual Effects, Best Original Score and Best Original Song — and earned nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. Julie Andrews, cast by director Robert Stevenson months after Audrey Hepburn took the My Fair Lady role she had played on stage, made the nanny immortal. Dick Van Dyke played Bert, the chimney sweep and street musician who narrates the London of 1906, while Jane and Michael Banks are the children Mary Poppins is hired to raise after their previous nanny resigns and the children alert the household through the chimney. Mr. Banks, a rigid bank clerk, distrusts his wife's judgment on the household. The songs, including 'A Spoonful of Sugar' and 'Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious' — the latter absent from the novel — became the film's signature. Travers long resisted selling the rights, a battle dramatized in John Lee Hancock's 2013 Saving Mr. Banks, with Emma Thompson as Travers and Tom Hanks as Disney. Mary Poppins leaves when the wind changes, but the character returned in the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, set twenty years later with Emily Blunt.