Emma Thompson is getting into the habit of playing nanny-linked parts. Steve Pratt reports

IT was Emma Thompson’s husband who pointed out a link between two of her movie characters – Nanny McPhee, who she’s played twice on screen, and writer PL Travers, creator of another unorthodox childminder, Mary Poppins.

“He said it’s interesting that you created a magical nanny and then played someone who created a magical nanny – do you think behind every nanny is a cantankerous, opinionated old bat? It took me a while for that to sink in,” says double Oscar-winner Thompson.

“Maybe there is an alter ego, someone you wish you could be.”

She plays Travers in Saving Mr Banks, the true story of how Walt Disney invited her to Hollywood in 1961 in a bid to get her to sell him the rights to turn her Mary Poppins books into a movie. For 20 years she had refused, fearful that her story would be Disney-fied or filled with cartoon animals.

Travers was definitely a difficult woman as tape recordings of her meetings with the creative time behind Mary Poppins the film show. “With Walt and the mouse and Pam and her nanny these are characters that have been created out of the soul of that person, when the soul is very vulnerable and emergent,” explains Thompson.

“What that gives them is their power, their staying power. She said that she didn’t invent Mary Poppins, Mary Poppins just arrived. I think most writers of genius would say the same thing.”

Getting into the mindset of Travers was easy.

“I just let out my inner prickly pear. Just basically be my true self,” says Thompson, not entirely seriously. “I only hide that for effect because you get on better. I just let it all hang out and I have to tell you it’s such a relief to be rude without any repercussions whatsoever.”

She gives an example. Can you imagine if I’d said before the launch for Saving Mr Banks, “I don’t want to go to your f***ing press conference”, she says. “You just come out with these things – and she did. She said what she meant. I can do that sometimes and it gets you into trouble, and probably will now. But that’s what was so great.”

Returning to Travers, she recalls that the writer had a theory later in life that women’s lives are divided into three main parts - nymph, mother and crone. “There’s something very true about that and we wanted to put a part of each part into this incarnation of her. That’s creative licence, I suppose. You’re taking bits and folding them back in in a period of time – two hours. That’s not very long to stay with a very complicated character.”

Thompson’s research included listening to tapes of Travers’ meetings with Disney and the Sherman brothers, who wrote the film’s songs, and reading her autobiography. “It’s really hard work listening to those tapes because P L is so awful and so irritating. Just listening to them makes you want to throw something heavy at her.

But there are lots of little clues about what’s really going on as well,” she says.

“There was a huge number of sources and almost perplexing and difficult number of choices to portray a perplexing and difficult woman. I’ve never played anyone more full of contradictions.

She was a prolific writer, so there’s all her books, her essays, her journalism and her poetry. There’s her autobiography and also a documentary on her life.”

Thompson has even more to say about Travers in a BBC2 Culture Show Special tonight, when Victoria Coren Mitchell examines the writer’s life in The Secret Life Of Mary Poppins