20 Brilliant Sci-Fi & Fantasy Films Where Actors Play Opposite Themselves

The story of an upper-class London family finding a nanny who will do literally everything for them is nothing new, but musical fantasy Mary Poppins added a spoonful of sugar to the formula in the mid-1960s and made it the stuff of legend.

Julie Andrews plays the magical nanny, who arrives at the Banks’ household with a bagful of tricks and just enough sass to get young George and Jane (David Tomlinson and Karen Dotrice) clean, tidy, and engaging with their father, the suffragettes, and the working classes - the latter in the form of Dick Van Dyke’s cockney chimney sweep Bert.

Van Dyke’s terrible accent is legendary, but his performance is one for the ages, or should we say two. Because he doesn’t just play Bert, he also takes on the role of the mean, wizened, and warped old bank manager Mr. Dawes Sr. So different are the performances, and so nifty are the prosthetics, that it’s easy not to notice the dual role here. Yet only Van Dyke could have turned the old coot into a cackling, floating fool by the film’s conclusion.