Producers and directors would bend over backwards to cast British actress Glynis Johns. Walt Disney rewrote
Mary Poppins to include a musical number for Johns, who had thought she would be playing the lead rather than the children’s mother and Stephen Sondheim specifically composed a song for Johns —
Send In The Clowns — when she agreed to take the lead in his new musical
A Little Night Music. The daughter of actor Mervyn Johns and Australian-born concert pianist Alyce Steele-Wareham (whose family show frequently toured New Zealand), Johns was born in South Africa while her parents were on tour. Her showbiz genes soon asserted themselves and by the age of 10 she was an accomplished dancer, earning a teaching certificate a year later. Her stage debut as a actress came at the age of 8, and in 1938, aged 15, she appeared in the first of more than 60 films. She became a star in the 1940s, chiefly through her breakthrough role in the 1941 war drama
49th Parallel. In 1948 she had a box office hit in
Miranda, which helped her land a leading role in the 1951 British-American production
No Highway in the Sky. That opened doors across the Atlantic, and in 1952 Johns made both her television and Broadway debuts. She then appeared in two Walt Disney British productions,
The Sword and the Rose and
Rob Roy, before making her first Hollywood picture,
The Court Jester. Johns’ first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress, came in 1960 for her part in
The Sundowners.
Mary Poppins (1964) was a high point of the decade for Johns, who in the ’70s turned more to the stage for work, notably the Sondheim role in 1973. As Desiree Armfeldt, she won a Tony Award for best actress in a musical. Her career then started to wind down but Johns continued to pop up in unexpected places, such as playing Dianne’s mother in the sitcom Cheers and as an occasional guest star on Murder She Wrote. In 1998 Disney named Johns a legend of the film company and the following year she made her final movie, Superstar. The four-times married Johns had one child, the actor Gareth Forwood, who predeceased her. Johns died on January 4, aged 100. — Agencies.
