The life of a child actor is often nasty, brutish and short (Google Macaulay Culkin). But playing Jane Banks in “Mary Poppins” was all high-flying kites, carousel horses — and a free pass to Disney’s theme parks.
“Uncle Walt spoiled us rotten!” says Karen Dotrice, 50 years after that Disney film opened on Aug. 26, 1964, and put “A Spoonful of Sugar” on everyone’s lips. Speaking from her summer home in Maine, the 58-year-old says her Disney days were magical, “especially for a girl from the English countryside.”
True, she wasn’t just any country girl: Parents Roy and Kay Dotrice were actors, Charles Laughton was her godfather, and Richard Burton a family friend. After Karen made her first film, Disney’s “The Three Lives of Thomasina,” at age 8, the Mouse King cast her and her slightly younger co-star Matthew Garber as the Banks children.
Before Karen knew it, she and her mum were living in a Hollywood Hills mansion that had an indoor pool with piped-in music. And lunches with “Uncle Walt” always ended with her arms full of stuffed Bambis.
She says Dick Van Dyke — Bert, the Cockney chimney sweep — was the biggest kid on the set: “He’s just very, very silly — he’d stick things up his nose and do whatever it took to get us to laugh.” But Julie Andrews was more complicated than she looked.
“She’s got a bit of a naughty mouth on her,” says Dotrice, without elaborating. Andrews smoked back then, so during breaks “there’d be Mary Poppins with a [cigarette] hanging out of her mouth!”
Yet it was Andrews who flew to her rescue at their first recording session. Before Dotrice left England, a vocal coach for the Royal Shakespeare Company taught her to warble “The Perfect Nanny” like an operetta star. The instant she began to sing in that quavering little voice, the studio musicians “pissed themselves laughing.” Dotrice burst into tears.
Luckily, Andrews was right beside her. “She said, ‘We’ll be back tomorrow!’ and whisked me off to her place,” Dotrice says. The “Sound of Music” star spent her rare day off teaching her how to sing like the little girl she was.
Of course, most of her scenes were with Garber, “a very naughty boy,” a prankster like Michael Banks, who really would put pepper in your tea. Though they made one more film together, they lost touch — and Dotrice says she was shocked when he died, at 21, of pancreatitis.
“I’ve felt a huge responsibility these years representing both of us,” she murmurs. “I hope he’s OK with the way I talk about the movie, because he’s 50 percent of it.”
After “Poppins” wrapped, it was back to England and public school. A few films and plays later, she returned to Hollywood, only to decide, in her mid-20s, that she was through with acting. She married and raised three children, none of whom, she says happily, wants to be an actor.
Her latest project: filling her and producer husband Ned Nalle’s new Malibu, Calif., home with animals — including Beyoncé the chicken and Chairman Meow, the cat she and her daughter rescued in Shanghai.
Disney — an animal lover whose favorite “Poppins” song was “Feed the Birds” — would be proud.