Was P.L. Travers racist of Americans?

Racist? I think you mean Prejudiced (against)!

Gentlemen, England will be playing 4-4-f---ing-2

Perhaps the reason was she had worked with Americans on the film and did NOT enjoy the experience.

Oh, and American is not a race. That did make me laugh, though. I live in a very diverse area where there are at least 4 different ethnicities here in the United States.

I've noticed this with British commonwealth writers and such. More recently, J.K. Rowling stipulated that only British actors would be cast in the Harry Potter movies, never mind that the films were by Warner Bros., a major American studio. Director Chris Columbus had chosen Liam Aiken, with whom he'd worked previously on Stepmom, for the title role, but Rowling nixed that idea. Also, Rosie O'Donnell, who enjoyed the books, expressed interest in a bit part (forget which), but she was turned down, too, per Rowling's order.

Back in the mid-'80s, when Disney was starting on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, they hired Canadian-born British animation director Richard Williams, who was renowned for his exquisite animated title sequences in films like The Pink Panther series, but he refused to work in L.A. with Americans, so production was moved to England for his convenience.

Imagine if Stephanie Meyers expressed disgust at the casting of non-Americans in her Twilight series? Or if a foreign actor were turned down for an iconic American role because of their nationality, e.g. Henry Cavill as Superman, James Garfield as Spider-Man, Christian Bale as Batman, Daniel Day-Lewis as Abraham Lincoln?

Hollywood is very welcoming to foreigners, but Americans for the most part aren't welcomed in other countries. And now more than ever you've got Brits and Aussies playing Americans.

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I imagine, if she were alive today, she actually would be appalled by the inflationary use of the word "racism" by Americans...

I don't think she was "racist" against Americans. I think it was just that she, like JK Rowlings had written books set in British. Why shouldn't British actors play British characters?

I don't think she was. her novel 'I Go By Sea, I Go By Land' about English children evacuated to America during the war, is very pro American i would say.

She did tell the driver in Saving Mr. Banks that he was the only American that she liked.

It wasn't anti-Americanism. In real life, Travers really didn't understand what the Disney people were trying to do. The Disney people didn't understand her, either, and apparently didn't even try to, and she was mightily offended by how patronised she felt by them. (A good indicator of the problem is how it actually became Disney corporate culture that Travers was a figure of ridicule and even resentment. A friend of mine was an apprentice animator at Disney, and says that any time Mary Poppins was mentioned, people would try to outdo each other at telling insulting anecdotes about Travers, made-up or otherwise.)

Her experiences brought her to the conclusion (perhaps unfairly, perhaps not) that the American culture was incompatible with the stories she'd written being told the way she wanted to see them told. he was an Australian who had emigrated to England, and people who were close to her said she was almost determined to be more English than the English. She was fiercely protective of the Englishness of her creation.

So it wasn't bigotry, or jingoism, let alone racism. If anything, it was a kind of cultural narrow-mindedness, and a conflict between her perfectionism and her attempts to be authoritarian in an artform she really knew nothing about. That's why, when she agreed to the stage musical version, she tried to make sure that this time there'd be a version of Mary Poppins the way she wanted to see it.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.