Camillus travers hone twin brother
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‘Mary Poppins’ author destroyed adopted son’s life
Emma Thompson plays the Australian-born creator of Mary Poppins in a new movie. But omitted from the spelfilm are details from Pamela Lyndon Travers anställda life that reveal a far darker side to the famously difficult writer.
“Saving Mr. Banks” also stars Tom Hanks as Walt Disney, with the bio depicting Disney’s 20-year battle to secure the movie rights for Travers’ story.
Particularly disturbing was Travers’ adoption of her son, a twin who was separated from his brother because Travers decided she only wanted one of the boys. This decision was to have terrible repercussions for both their lives.
Travers was born in Queensland to British parents but it wasn’t mot she moved to London in her 20s that her career took off.
After failed attempts at acting she devoted herself to writing, publishing “Mary Poppins” to great acclaim in 1934.
In spite of her literary success true love el
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PL Travers, aged 60, is on a flight to Hollywood and her suitcase is too large for the luggage rack. They want to take it away but she insists she must keep her bag with her. A young woman with a baby in her arms generously allows her case to be taken down instead. Travers, far from grateful, eyes the baby coldly and says: “Will the child be a nuisance?”
In the new film Saving Mr Banks, Emma Thompson is practically perfect at delivering the withering putdowns of Travers, reminding us that not all children’s authors are renowned for their love of children. Indeed, Travers claimed emphatically that she did not write for children at all. But the film is a fictionalised episode in a long, complex life.
Few knew that behind the quintessentially English nanny named Mary Poppins was an Australian. Five Mary Poppins books – including a translation of one into Latin, Maria Poppina ab A ad Z – had appeared by 1967 when Travers was featured in a “Meet the Author” feature in the first is
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➡️Second part
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In 1939, just four years after the death of Æ (poet George William Russell, editor of the Irish Statesman, the leading literary newspaper of the nascent Irish Free State, her mentor, and more) as she approached forty, Pamela Travers decided that she wanted a child. But not just any baby, it would be a baby with Irish blood and a strong literary lineage. So she went to Ireland and adopted an infant, the grandson of W. B. Yeats’ first biographer and Æ’s publisher. He was named Camillus Hone.
Hone and his wife were raising their many grandchildren who had been dumped into their care but they could not cope.
So they arranged for the two youngest of the brood, six month old twin brothers, to be adopted by a trusted family friend from London: Pamela Lyndon Travers.
The writer however refused to take her twin brother Anthony, too, or any of their other siblings; she had selected Camillus following the advice of her astrologer, consulted