Glynis Johns, the Tony Award-winning stage and screen star who played Winifred Banks opposite Julie Andrews in the classic movie Mary Poppins, and introduced the world to Stephen Sondheim's bittersweet Send in the Clowns has died. She was 100.
Mitch Clem, her manager, said she died of natural causes on Thursday, January 4, at an assisted living home in Los Angeles. "Today's a sad day for Hollywood," Clem said. "She is the last of the last of old Hollywood."
Johns was known to be a perfectionist in her work – precise, analytical and opinionated. The roles she took had to be multi-faceted. Anything less was giving less than her all. "As far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested in playing the role on only one level," she told the Associated Press (AP) in 1990. "The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to be real."
Johns' greatest triumph was playing Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Music, for which she won a Tony in 1973. Sondheim wrote the show's hit song Send in the Clowns to suit her distinctive husky voice, but she lost the part in the 1977 film version to Elizabeth Taylor.
"I've had other songs written for me, but nothing like that," Johns told the AP in 1990. "It's the greatest gift I've ever been given in the theater."
Johns was the fourth generation of an English theatrical family. Her father, Mervyn Johns, had a long career as a character actor and her mother was a pianist. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, because her parents were visiting the area at the time of her birth.
Johns was a dancer at 12 and an actor at 14 in London's West End. Her breakthrough role was as the amorous mermaid in the title of the 1948 hit comedy Miranda. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in The Sundowners, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum.
A career highlight was playing the mother in Mary Poppins, the movie that introduced Julie Andrews to the world, and in which she sang the rousing tune "Sister Suffragette."
Johns lived all around the world and had four husbands. The first was the father of her only child, the late Gareth Forwood, an actor who died in 2007.