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Glynis Johns, the British actress who in a trans-Atlantic profession that endured for greater than 60 years gained a Tony Award for her position in “A Little Evening Music,” giving husky, emotion-rich voice to the present’s most memorable quantity, “Ship Within the Clowns,” and performed an exuberant Edwardian suffragist within the Disney film traditional “Mary Poppins,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. She was 100.
The dying, at an assisted residing facility, was confirmed by her supervisor, Mitch Clem.
Ms. Johns was 49 and on the point of her fourth divorce when the Stephen Sondheim musical “A Little Evening Music” opened on the Shubert Theater in February 1973. The New York Occasions described her character, Desirée Armfeldt, as “a barely world‐weary and intensely lovewise actress in flip‐of‐the‐century Sweden.”
The critics adored her. To Clive Barnes of The Occasions, “the misty-voiced and glistening-eyed Glynis Johns was all tremulous understanding.”
To Walter Kerr, additionally writing in The Occasions, she was “that cousin of bullfrogs and consort of weary gods”; she was “discreet, harmful … and gratifyingly humorous.”
When she obtained the award for greatest actress in a musical on the 1973 Tony Awards presentation, she thanked the present’s “entire firm” who “have given me again a pleasure that I had misplaced within the theater.”
Earlier than then, she had been greatest generally known as a really completely different form of character. In “Mary Poppins,” Disney’s award-winning 1965 household musical, Ms. Johns was Mrs. Banks, an enthusiastic spouse, mom and political activist in 1910 London.
Whereas her two young children have been having adventures with their supernatural nanny, memorably performed by Julie Andrews, Mrs. Banks was placing on a sash that stated “Votes for Girls” and planning to “throw issues on the prime minister.”
Ms. Johns’s straightforward versatility prompt that she might need been born to behave, however it had not been her solely ardour, as she informed The Los Angeles Occasions in 1991. “I wished to be a scientist,” she stated. “I’d’ve beloved to go on and on and on on the college. However you may’t do all the things in life.”
“And I didn’t have any alternative on the time,” she added. World Warfare II “broke out after I was 16.”
Glynis Margaret Payne Johns was born on Oct. 5, 1923, in Pretoria, South Africa, the place her mother and father, each of whom have been artists, have been on tour.
Her father, Mervyn Johns, was a Welsh actor who went on to a prolific London theater and movie profession,; he was maybe greatest generally known as Bob Cratchit within the 1951 British movie “Scrooge” (launched as “A Christmas Carol” in the USA). Her mom, Alice Maude (Steele-Wareham) Johns, who was Australian, was a live performance pianist who performed underneath the stage identify Alyse Steele-Payne.
Glynis studied on the London Ballet College from the age of 5. When she made her stage debut within the youngsters’s play “Buckie’s Bears” at 12, she turned the fourth era — on her mom’s aspect — to make a profession within the theater.
And she or he grew up onstage. In 1936, she was the troublemaking schoolgirl who drove the plot in Lillian Hellman’s play “The Youngsters’s Hour.” A yr later she performed the fairy story heroine in “A Kiss for Cinderella”; in 1943 she performed the title position in “Peter Pan.”
She made her movie debut in “South Using” (1938) as Ralph Richardson’s daughter. She acted in a battle drama, “forty ninth Parallel” (1941), starring Laurence Olivier. In “An Best Husband” (1947), she was Oscar Wilde’s frivolous and spirited Mabel Chiltern.
When Ms. Johns’s films have been proven in the USA, they have been met with real, if faint, reward. Of “Miranda” (1949), a comedy a few mermaid who wished to see London, Bosley Crowther wrote in The Occasions, “Glynis Johns is bewitching — one half of her is, not less than — because the coyly flirtatious finny creature.” When she returned in “State Secret” (1950), with Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Mr. Crowther discovered her “very saucy and explosive because the music corridor lady.”
Precisely when she made her Hollywood display screen debut is a matter of opinion. “No Freeway within the Sky” (1951), wherein she performed a soft-spoken and really military-looking flight attendant, was a Twentieth Century Fox image that starred James Stewart however was filmed in England.
She additionally made two Disney movies overseas that have been British co-productions. In “The Sword and the Rose” (1953), she performed Henry VIII’s little sister; in “Rob Roy” (1953), the Scottish freedom fighter’s spouse.
She appeared in additional than a dozen Hollywood films, displaying aristocratic restraint as usually as rowdy working-class enthusiasm.
Ms. Johns was a correct turn-of-the-Twentieth-century Southern belle fed up along with her exasperating husband (Jackie Gleason) within the comedy “Papa’s Delicate Situation” (1963) and a loquacious Australian innkeeper in “The Sundowners” (1960), which starred Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr, and for which she obtained an Academy Award nomination.
Along with enjoying the London suffragist in “Mary Poppins” (1965), she was the comedian aid in “The Chapman Report” (1962), a Nineteenth-century Scottish immigrant within the drama “All Mine to Give” (1957), James Stewart’s spouse in “Expensive Brigitte” (1965), a comedy a few math prodigy, and an creator having an excessive amount of enjoyable to complete her ebook in “Don’t Simply Stand There” (1968).
Happy with her Welsh heritage, she appeared in “Underneath Milk Wooden” (1971), a British movie model of the poet Dylan Thomas’s radio play that starred and was partly narrated by Richard Burton. As Myfanwy Worth, a Welsh fishing village’s dressmaker and sweet-shop proprietor, she fantasized passionately concerning the draper on the opposite aspect of city.
In “The Ref” (1994), she was Kevin Spacey’s unpleasant mom. In “Whereas You Had been Sleeping” (1995), she was the comatose hero’s fragile grandmother. Her final movie was “Famous person” (1999), a comedy wherein she performed Molly Shannon’s take-charge grandmother, who ran over a priest in her motorized wheelchair.
On American tv, she was a thriller author in a quick sequence of her personal, “Glynis” (1963), and performed the well-dressed, chauffeur-driven mom of Diane Chambers on an episode of “Cheers.” Within the 1982 mini-series “Little Gloria … Completely satisfied at Final,” she was Gloria Vanderbilt’s mom’s mom, a vibrant flapper of a sure age.
However Ms. Johns had begun her profession on the stage, and she or he returned to it usually. She made her Broadway debut in “Gertie” (1952), incomes favorable evaluations — “Quietly humorous in all the things she does,” stated The Occasions — however the play closed after 5 performances.
She gained over Broadway audiences because the title character of George Bernard Shaw’s “Main Barbara” (1956), a munitions heiress working in a Salvation Military shelter, starring with Charles Laughton. The Occasions’s Brooks Atkinson declared the manufacturing “a standoff” between Laughton and Shaw, however The Each day Information referred to as the comedy “among the finest in lots of seasons.”
On Broadway, she was in a second Shaw play, “Too True to Be Good” (1963), with Lillian Gish.
In London, her stage roles included Anne of Cleves in “The King’s Mare” (1966) and Alma Rattenbury, a infamous Nineteen Thirties assassin, in “Trigger Célèbre” (1977). Within the early Seventies she did a global tour — enjoying England, the USA and Australia — in Noël Coward’s romantic comedy “The Marquise.”
Her ultimate look on Broadway, reverse Rex Harrison in his final stage manufacturing, was in W. Somerset Maugham’s comedy “The Circle” (1989).
Ms. Johns was married and divorced 4 occasions. Her first husband, from 1942 to 1948, was Anthony Forwood, a British actor. She was then married to David R. Foster (1952-56) and Cecil Henderson (1960-62), each businessmen, and at last to Elliott Arnold (1964-73), an American function author and novelist.
Her solely youngster, a son, Gareth Forwood, died in 2007. She is survived by a grandson and three great-grandchildren. She was a longtime resident of Los Angeles.
Perhaps it was simply as nicely that destiny had pushed her into present enterprise. In her youth, she was quoted as saying in a 1973 article in The Occasions, she had “wished to steer what I considered a ‘regular’ existence, however I quickly discovered I wasn’t as regular away from the theater as in it.”
She concluded, “Appearing is my highest type of intelligence, the time after I use the most effective a part of my mind.”
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
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