Mary Poppins

Miles Corwin has a much greater problem differentiating between movies and real life than the actors he attacks in his article. If everyone held his opinion, then Anthony Hopkins should not have played Hannibal Lector because he never murdered anyone and Julie Andrews should be censured for playing Mary Poppins because she can't fly. An actor's only responsibility is to bring life to the part he plays convincingly and believably. John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Sylvester Stallone have been entertaining and inspiring audiences for years.

It is the sort of incident that makes parents everywhere shudder. Returning from work one evening, Timothy McCalmont discovered 2-year-old Dylan alone in the playroom, whimpering. In the next room was his nanny, asleep on a couch. McCalmont woke the woman and fired her on the spot. Dylan was unharmed and is now cared for by a nanny the McCalmonts consider attentive and warm. Even so, his brush with the napping nanny two years ago gnaws at McCalmont.

JULIE ANDREWS--whose first sitcom, "Julie," is expected to premiere on ABC in the spring--and her husband, producer Blake Edwards, have sold their Malibu home of 20 years for about $8.5 million and are making Brentwood their primary residence, sources say. Andrews, who starred in "Mary Poppins" in 1964 and "The Sound of Music" in 1965 before making "S.O.B." and "Victor/Victoria," will play the star of a TV variety show who moves from New York to Iowa in "Julie."

With reference to Joe Leydon's "Directing Is a 'Rush' " (April 28): I applaud Lili Zanuck's courage in moving into the male territory of Hollywood producers and directors. The enthusiasm of her husband, Richard Zanuck, for her project is perfectly natural; however, the pejorative contrast he makes between the choice of "Rush" and a "Mary Poppins kind of story" is ironic. Mary Poppins was an independent thinker who, along with suffragette Mrs. Banks, turns the Banks household upside down so that stuffy Mr. Banks will appreciate his real treasures.

The British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Los Angeles is hosting a 21-film, eight-day "British and the Oscar Film Festival" at the Edwards Town Center Cinema starting today at 3 with a screening of "Mary Poppins." About half the films are British productions and half are American. What links them are Academy Awards won by Britons for acting, directing, composing and technical work, according to Christopher Toyne, one of the festival organizers.

Robert Mitchum boggles the mind as a crusty, grizzled sort of Mary Poppins in the TV movie "A Family for Joe" (Sunday at 9 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39), the pilot for a series that NBC will show later this spring. Mitchum takes on the nanny role in this unlikely story about four upscale orphans who hire a derelict to live with them as their grandfather, so they won't have to go to foster homes.

Mary Poppins would have been appalled. At Britain's first national "Nanny Fair" here earlier this month, one of the speakers was a union organizer. A hot topic during an open question-and-answer session was male nannies and the danger of AIDS. Although their crisply starched predecessors of British lore might have suffered in silence, the blue-jeaned nannies at this gathering heckled the head of England's Working Mothers Assn. loud and long for what they perceived as snobbish remarks.