Within the childhood reminiscences of a couple of technology, Glynis Johns, who has died aged 100, will probably be finest remembered because the Edwardian materfamilias of the massively common Walt Disney musical Mary Poppins (1964). Winifred Banks, married to David Tomlinson’s George W Banks, is the mom of Jane and Michael, the youngsters within the care of the magical nanny performed by Julie Andrews. A protester for the appropriate to vote, Winifred delivers a spirited rendition of the track Sister Suffragette – “Our daughters’ daughters will adore us. They usually’ll sing in grateful refrain: ‘Properly executed, Sister Suffragette!’” – as the youngsters’s earlier nanny tries to give up.
However the husky-voiced actor had different claims to fame from her greater than 60 movies and 30 stage productions. In 1973, Stephen Sondheim composed the track Ship within the Clowns for Johns when she was forged within the main function of the premiere manufacturing of his musical A Little Evening Music, on Broadway. And she or he had received preliminary stardom within the British cinema as a mermaid.
Within the title function of the movie comedy Miranda (1948), she travels from Cornwall to London and causes romantic issues among the many Chelsea set. Though the movie’s whimsy might now appear strained, it was an incredible business success in its day, making Johns a top-liner in British motion pictures. Miranda returned in a moderately belated sequel, Mad About Males (1954).
By that point, Johns had moved virtually fully from stage to movies, the place she was related mainly with light-weight roles, alternately fluffy and feisty. One in every of her most interesting alternatives got here within the thriller State Secret (1950, launched as The Nice Manhunt within the US), taking part in a cabaret artiste in a fictitious Balkan nation, and gamely singing Paper Doll in an entirely invented language.
It says one thing for her properties of youthfulness that on the age of 30 she may play a teenage schoolgirl within the melodrama Private Affair (1953). The identical yr she performed in two fanciful Walt Disney British productions, as Mary Tudor in The Sword and the Rose, and because the heroine spouse of Rob Roy, and she or he went on to make her first Hollywood image, the Danny Kaye comedy The Court docket Jester, in 1955. The next yr she performed a cameo function within the star-studded Across the World in 80 Days.
On the time Johns alternated between American and British movies, usually in subordinate roles, however a rewarding one got here in The Sundowners (1960), set in Australia, as a jolly barmaid who takes a shine to a visiting Englishman performed by Peter Ustinov. It introduced her an Oscar nomination as finest supporting actress. High billing got here in a trendy horror film, The Cupboard of Caligari (1962). She was nicely sufficient recognized to American audiences by this time to star in 1963 in Glynis, a TV sitcom sequence that ran for only one season.
In 1966 Johns returned to the London stage in The King’s Mare, as Anne of Cleves to Keith Michell’s Henry VIII. Her Welsh heritage got here into play when she took the function of Myfanwy Worth in a display screen model of Dylan Thomas’s Below Milk Wooden (1971) starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole, and two years later got here her nice Broadway success as Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Evening Music, which introduced her a Tony award.
Glynis got here from a present enterprise background: her mom, Alice Steele (nee Wareham), was a live performance pianist who carried out beneath the identify Alys Steele-Payne, and her father was the prolific character actor Mervyn Johns. He was a stalwart particularly of Ealing Studios movies: father and daughter appeared collectively in an Ealing drama, The Midway Home (1944).
Although her vocal intonations pointed to her Welshness, Glynis was born in Pretoria, South Africa, the place her dad and mom had been on tour. She was reportedly carried on to the stage on the age of three weeks, and it was not an excessive amount of longer earlier than she was showing there in knowledgeable capability, making her performing debut on the Garrick theatre, London, as a dancer in a revue known as Buckie’s Bears (1935).
Educated at Clifton highschool, Bristol, and South Hampstead highschool and the Cone College of Dancing in London, she quickly graduated to juvenile appearing roles in each theatre and cinema. Her first display screen look got here on the age of 14, as politician Ralph Richardson’s troublesome daughter in South Using (1938), and on stage she was the younger sister, one other Miranda, in Esther McCracken’s comedies Quiet Marriage ceremony (1938) and Quiet Weekend (1941).
That yr introduced the chance to look within the movie forty ninth Parallel, starring Leslie Howard and Laurence Olivier in a spy thriller supposed to bolster second world struggle help within the US. When the prospect of taking part in a mermaid got here after the struggle, she was ready to attract on her theatrical versatility: “I used to be fairly an athlete, my muscle mass had been robust from dancing, so the tail was simply wonderful. I swam like a porpoise.”
Johns returned to the London stage in 1977, as Terence Rattigan’s option to play the assassin Alma Rattenbury in his well-received dramatisation of the Rattenbury case, Trigger Célèbre. Her appearing appearances turned sporadic, although in 1989 she starred with Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger on Broadway in Somerset Maugham’s The Circle.
She was sometimes a visitor star in US tv sequence reminiscent of Homicide She Wrote and The Love Boat, and performed Diane’s wealthy mom, Helen Chambers, within the first sequence of Cheers (1983) and Trudie Pepper within the sitcom Coming of Age (1988-89). By the point of her closing movies, Whereas You Have been Sleeping (1995) and Celebrity (1999), she was a characterful grandmother.
Johns was married and divorced 4 occasions. Her first husband, from 1942 to 1948, was the actor Anthony Forwood. Their son, Gareth, additionally an actor, died in 2007. Marriages to 2 businessmen adopted: David Foster, from 1952 to 1956, and Cecil Henderson, from 1960 to 1962. She was married to Elliott Arnold, a novelist, from 1964 to 1973, and is survived by a grandson and three great-grandchildren.
