I want to tell you about an experience that really shook me last weekend. It’s got nothing to do with Corona Conspiracies, or government fuck ups…
Like all good stories, it starts in the Hollywood Hills.
Sort of.
It starts in my living room actually, but I was watching a film at the time… a Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant film called Sylvia Scarlett.
In this film Cary Grant plays a Cockney conman.
I don’t know if you have seen Sylvia Scarlett. For those of you in the UK – it’s currently on BBC iPlayer, if you haven’t. I honestly cannot recommend it. It’s a dreadful film, which even Katharine Hepburn can’t save. But that is by the by…
What was my point?
Cary Grant. Cary Grant was English. Not from London, from Bristol. But still… he was English. So you would expect him to have a vague idea of what a Cockney accent sounds like…
Well…
Its hard to say whether Cary, dashing as he was, had never met a Londoner, or if he just thought that the American movie-going public wasn’t aurally prepared for a cockney accent… but the sounds that come out of his mouth were frankly (and I say this as someone with a lot of time for CG) one of the worst things I’ve ever heard.
Truly, truly bad.
So bad that The Husband came in from the next room to find out what was going on.
Now. (Bear with me.)
Fast forward 30 years to the making of Mary Poppins… and yes, you’ve guessed it, the man synonymous with terrible cockney accents, Dick van Dyke.
Every actor has a different method, and approach to a role, and I have no idea what that is for old Dicky. But whatever it was in the early 60s, it didn’t work on the accent front. And since Mary Poppins went on to become one of the most famous and viewed movies of all time, almost 60 years later, we still bear regular witness to the massive flaming car crash that is poor Dick’s accent.
I cannot think of an actor who, despite being so adored by the masses, is subjected to such regular abuse about an accent.
And I am here to offer you a different target…
After watching Sylvia Scarlett, I think that maybe the person we should be holding to account is not Dick van Dyke… an innocent victim of circumstances, but Cary Grant… an evil mastermind.
(Keep bearing with me…)
There are two pieces of evidence I want to draw your attention to:
1) Walt Disney originally wanted Cary Grant for the role of Bert…
2) Cary Grant asked Dick van Dyke to star in another film with him and DvD refused….
NOW… like any good conspiracy theorist I’m not going to bother checking facts.
I don’t know why Cary Grant wasn’t cast, it was possibly because he had another job he wanted to do and didn’t accept the role of Bert… but I’m going to assume that he desperately wanted that role.
I also don’t know how he felt when Dick van Dyke refused his offer of a collaboration… and I don’t even know if it happened before or after Mary Poppins was made… he may not have been bothered, and it may have been years later… but I am going to decide to believe that he was SEETHING with rage that anyone would dare turn him down… HE WAS CARY GRANT, DON’T YOU KNOW!? (And that it happened before Mary Poppins was made…)
Once we accept these two complete and utter assumptions, which I have just pulled out of my brain from nowhere, as fact, the picture becomes clear:
Dick van Dyke, despite being surrounded by Brits on the set of MP, approached a man he had always been a fan of, the English actor, Cary Grant. He asked for help with an accent he knew nothing about, innocently believing that Grant was someone he could trust, who knew the accent well. Cary Grant, green with envy that Van Dyke he taken the role that was rightfully his, and still aware of the bitter taste of rejection that had filled his (not great with a cockney accent) mouth when the younger man had had the audacity to turn down his offer of a collaboration, saw his chance for revenge, and boy, did he take it…
Ladies and Gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that Grant laughed an evil laugh to himself… that he told Mr Van Dyke he would assist, that he spent hours teaching him how to contort his mouth into ridiculous shapes which resulted in appalling, bloodcurdling vowel sounds previously unknown to man, and that he packed him off with some big giant reels of film of Sylvia Scarlett and a projector to cement his evil master plan from a distance…
As soon as I pieced this together, a cloud lifted. A cloud that had so fundamentally shaped who I have been ever since I first saw Mary Poppins.
And the lifting of that cloud has changed me.
It shook me to my very core.
This was originally posted on Facebook
My Name is Not Debbie 