Dick van Dyke has experienced more than a half century of ribbing from fans about his famously off-radar “cockney” accent in Mary Poppins, the veteran US actor has revealed.
Speaking as he picked up a lifetime achievement award for humanitarian work at the Princess Grace Foundation Awards in Beverly Hills, Van Dyke said he would never be allowed to forget his turn as chimney sweep Bert in the 1964 Disney musical.
“People in the UK love to rib me about my accent, I will never live it down,” he said. “They ask what part of England I was meant to be from and I say it was a little shire in the north where most of the people were from Ohio.”
Van Dyke, 88, said he was completely unaware during the shoot that anything was wrong with his attempted cockney brogue. “I was working with an entire English cast and nobody said a word, not Julie [Andrews], not anybody said I needed to work on it so I thought I was alright,” he said.
Van Dyke, who met Prince Albert and Princess Charlene of Monaco on the red carpet for the awards ceremony named for the late Grace Kelly, was asked what kept him young. His reply: “My young wife, she puts me in the fridge.”
Famously terrible English accents on film
1. Dick Van Dyke as cheerful chimney sweep Bert in Mary Poppins (1965)
2. Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker in Frances Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992)
3. Don Cheadle as “cockney” explosives expert Basher Tarr in Ocean’s Eleven (2001)
4. Russell Crowe as an Irish-ish Robin in Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010)
5. Forest Whitaker as a supposedly English soldier The Crying Game (1992)
