The film musical Mary Poppins was instantly recognised as a visual masterpiece on its release in 1964, when it won Julie Andrews an Oscar for her performance as the Banks’s children’s nanny and gave Walt Disney his biggest box-office success to date. Andrews’s then husband, Tony Walton, who has died aged 87 after suffering a stroke, was responsible for the set and costume design that brought a magical look to a screen fantasy combining live action with animation.
He was thrilled that the Sherman brothers, Richard and Robert, who wrote the songs, suggested switching the story to late-Edwardian 1910 from the 1930s setting of PL Travers’s original book and its sequels, because Disney had acquired rights to the story but not the illustrations. “I love the turn-of-the-century look,” he said in a 2011 interview. “I loved to design for it, so that was a godsend for me.”
