Winds from the east, and a mist coming in, rolled over Brooklyn Heights the other day, bringing Emily Mortimer, the British actress, to the door of a coffee shop. Finding a seat, she recalled a song from “Mary Poppins,” the 1964 Disney film, in which Mrs. Banks, the mother of Jane and Michael, wears a “Votes for Women” sash and sings cheerfully of throwing off “the shackles of yesterday.” (“Take heart, for Missus Pankhurst has been clapped in irons again!”) “There’s a part where she goes”—Mortimer paused, then began to sing—“ ‘Though we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they’re rather stupid.’ ” She beamed. “It’s just so perfect!”
That early Technicolor rendering of a plucky suffragette, enthusiastic about her cause but forgetful of her children, has sparked debate ever since. Does the film parody suffragettes, or does it celebrate them? On the one hand, Mrs. Banks is a bad mother. On the other, the songs are so catchy! P. L. Travers, the author of the Mary Poppins books, took issue with the film. “Why in the world have you made Mrs. Banks a silly suffragette?” Emma Thompson, playing Travers, asks the Disney writers in the movie “Saving Mr. Banks.” “Being a mother is a job, it’s a very difficult job.”
In “Mary Poppins Returns,” the long-awaited sequel, opening next week, Mortimer plays the grownup Jane Banks. She’s a Ms., not a Mrs., and she’s not a suffragette. “Thank God,” Mortimer said. “We don’t have to worry about whether Jane is a good feminist or not.” (The story takes place in the nineteen-thirties, after British women have won the vote.) Instead, Jane is an activist for SPRUCE, or the Society for the Protection of the Rights of the Underpaid Citizens of England. She’s devoted to her work, and to the children of her brother, played by Ben Whishaw, but she’s lonely; both Bankses are. “Michael’s had a whole life with a woman who has now died, and Jane has given up ever thinking that she might have a love. Her job is sort of just to love everybody else,” Mortimer said. Enter Mary Poppins.
Sipping from a cup of herbal tea, Mortimer said that she was a fan of Disney’s Mrs. Banks: “What I love about it is that she’s so unself-righteous.” Mortimer wanted Jane to share a similar world view. “It’s something she really believes in, and probably would die for, but in a very jolly, hockey-sticks way.” She added, “I definitely saw that in my dad.” Mortimer grew up in Turville, Oxfordshire; her father, John Mortimer, was an author and a barrister, who once defended the Sex Pistols in an obscenity trial.
Mortimer had come to Brooklyn Heights from her home in nearby Boerum Hill to check out the former residence of the real-life suffragette Lucy Burns. She finished her tea and walked a few windy blocks to an elegant brick building on Willow Street, where Burns reportedly lived around 1935. Burns spent years in the U.K. with Emmeline Pankhurst—the heroine of Mrs. Banks’s song—enduring hunger strikes and, later, in the U.S., force-feeding. “It was quite fucking fierce, wasn’t it?” Mortimer said, peering at a stone archway. Mortimer mentioned her grandmother, who travelled to South Africa in 1913. “She was what was known as a New Woman,” she said. “You know, she swam naked in rivers and rode bareback across the veldt.”
Mortimer, whose two children are eight and fifteen, never had a nanny growing up, but she has employed a series of babysitters and au pairs, including one, a musician, who arrived sporting pink hair and black nail polish. Mortimer’s daughter, May, “instantly fell in love,” and the two recorded songs together, until the sitter got married and returned to her band. “Just like Mary Poppins, she came and went,” she said.
To shoot “Mary Poppins Returns,” Mortimer made sixteen trips to London from Brooklyn. On set, she found herself caring for the children in the film while missing her own. She reflected on Mrs. Banks’s plight. “In a way, she has to choose between being an activist and a mother,” she said. “It used to be that men going off to work was a noble thing, whereas for women it was an indulgence—something that was taking away from other people.” Times are changing, she added. “Men are having to deal with a bit of guilt they never had to feel before!”
The sun was going down. Mortimer called to cancel a piano lesson for her daughter (“I’m such a pushover”) and started to walk home. She passed her son’s school, and greeted a friend of his. (“You were so good in the play!”) Nearby, two nannies were waiting for their charges. One waved toward a playground, where a small boy waved back. She blew him a kiss. “Five minutes!” she said. ♦