May 7 - David Tomlinson

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On this day, in 1917, David Cecil MacAlister Tomlinson was born in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, England. David’s early life gave no indication of path he was eventually going to forge for himself. He went to boarding school at the venerable Tonbridge School in Kent, became a part of the British Army as a Grenadier Guard for 16 months and took a job his father, a respected lawyer, procured for him as a clerk in the London headquarters of Shell Oil. All very proper and aboveboard, as the English might say. It didn’t take long, however, for that Edwardian sense of propriety to start slipping.


It started with the revelation that David’s father was leading a double life, having sired another, separate family. A letter mailed to the wrong wife began unravelling the lies but when one of David’s brothers, from the upper level of a double decker bus, chanced to look into an apartment window and see their father lying in a strange bed casually reading the paper (he was supposed to be visiting his club), the duplicity had no choice but to be revealed. His father was wholly unapologetic, causing a rift between father and son that never healed. As an escape, David began acting in local amateur plays, soon discovering that he had a knack for that sort of thing. By 1940, he’d landed his first (uncredited naturally) film role in Garrison Follies. The following year brought him not one but three named roles and a starring role in the British war movie Name Rank and Number. Then World War II, as it did to so many people, fully interrupted his life, in more ways than he ever bargained for.

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David joined the Royal Air Force as a Flight Lieutenant. He was sent to Canada where he became a flight instructor, seemingly far away from the tragedies of war. While in North America, he met Mary Lindsay Hiddingh, the daughter of the vice president of the New York Like Insurance Company and already a war widow. Her first husband had been killed in action in 1941, leaving her two young sons fatherless. David and Mary hit it off, became romantically involved and married in September 1943. Two months later, he was reassigned to a position in London. Because of wartime restrictions on immigration, Mary and the boys weren’t allowed to travel with him. Apparently terrified that she would lose another husband to battle, Mary’s mental state quickly deteriorated. On December 2, 1943, she jumped from the 13^th floor of the Henry Hudson Hotel in New York City, with her two sons, killing all three of them. The blow was devastating to David. It would be another decade before he fell in love again and even years later he admitted he was still too distraught to ever visit Mary’s grave.

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Not that anyone was able to guess at David’s personal woes from his (usually) bright, cheery screen persona (I mean, there’s a reason it’s called acting, but even today, a whole lot of people can’t quite grasp that). Over the next eighteen years, he would star in 34 British films, mostly comedies with titles like Is Your Honeymoon Really Necessary? and Warning to Wantons. In 1963, David was part of the cast of the hugely successful comedy Tom Jones, playing the rare villainous role. All the sunny, yet sometimes stuffy characters David played over the years brought him to the attention of the producers at a studio in Burbank, California who were poised to give him everlasting, international fame.



A large chunk of the cast of Mary Poppins was relatively unknown in America (with the obvious exception of Dick Van Dyke). The Banks’ children, Matthew Garber and Karen Dotrice, had already appeared together in The Three Lives of Thomasina, but that was nothing compared to the fame that was coming. David, Glynis Johns and even Julie Andrews were not household names until August 27, 1964 when Mary Poppins exploded onto the big screen. David, already popular in Britain, would now be recognizable throughout most of the known world. Not only did he play the venerable George Banks, who wakes up to the fact that his children need their father to actually be present for their childhoods, but he also provides several other voices for the film, including Mary Poppins’ umbrella and a overdub for Admiral Boom’s first mate.

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David would return to the Walt Disney Studio twice more in his career, both times playing iconic characters (albeit not quite on the scale of Mr. Banks). In 1968, he played the bumbling villain, Peter Thorndyke, in The Love Bug. Three years later, in what was conceived as a reteaming with Julie Andrews (she turned down the part), he starred with Angela Lansbury in the big screen adaptation of Bedknobs and Broomsticks. This time around he plays a smooth talking con man who struggles with the fact that he may have actually taught someone real magic.

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Post Disney, David appeared in a handful of films throughout the Seventies and made a rare television appearance on an episode of Hawaii Five-O in 1976. His final film (which also happened to be Peter Sellers final film) was the unfortunate The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu in 1980. I’ve never seen it, but apparently it is just awful. Maybe David wouldn’t have retired from acting before its release if he’d known how bad it would be, but he probably still would have. He’d already done pretty much everything he’d ever wanted and was ready to concentrate on enjoying his family.



In 1953, David had married a second time, to an actress, Audrey Freeman. They had four sons together and enjoyed 47 years of relatively happy marriage. I say relatively, because one of their sons, Willie, was autistic. Being the parent of an autistic child today is no walk in the park, but it was far worse in the Sixties. In his memoir, David writes with bitter frustration about living through a time when doctors barely recognized autism as a condition, forget being able to get a diagnosis for it. He also recounted the stark lack of sympathy he and his wife got from friends and family, calling most people’s reactions to his son downright inhuman. His (bad) relationship with his father may have gotten him into acting, but he got out of it determined to have a good one with his son.



David quietly lived out the last two decades of his life, doting on his children and grandchildren, occasionally reliving his marvelous career in an interview. Then, on June 23, 2000 he suffered a massive stroke and was rushed to King Edward VII’s Hospital in Westminster. Early in the morning of June 24, he passed away without regaining consciousness. Two years later, he was posthumously declared an official Disney Legend for portraying not one but three titans of Disneyana and living forever in our hearts.