2024-01-05 01:11:24
Glynis Johnsstar of the film classic “Mary Poppins,” died this Thursday at 100 years old. This was confirmed by Mitch Clem, his manager, who explained that the death occurred in a nursing home in Los Angeles and was due to natural causes.
“Today is a sad day for Hollywood,” Clem said, according to the AP agency. “She is the last of the last of old Hollywood”.
Johns was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and was the daughter of the actor Mervyn Johns, in a family of theatrical lineage. She came to the big screen as a teenager and throughout her career she became a theater and film star. One of her most memorable roles is the one she had in the original Mary Poppins, the Disney production that was directed by Robert Stevenson and enchanted entire generations.
There he acted alongside the protagonist Julie Andrews. She played the role of Winifred Banks, the mother of the children Mary Poppins cared for. It wasn’t her only achievement: she marveled at the bittersweet song “Send in the Clowns”which Stephen Sondheim wrote especially for her in the musical “A Little Night Music” although it would later be left out of the film version.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing a monochromatic role,” she said in 1990. “The goal of a first-class performance is to make it real. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind so that 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 play’s hit song “Send in the Clowns” to suit her distinctive husky voice, but in 1977 Johns lost the role in the film version starring por Elizabeth Taylor.
Glynis Johns, the musical actress who died this Thursday at the age of 100. AP Photo
“They wrote me other songs, but nothing like that,” Johns confessed. “It’s the greatest gift they’ve given me in the theater.”
Others who performed Sondheim’s famous song were Frank SinatraJudy Collins, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Vaughan and Olivia Newton-John. He also appeared in the second season of “Yellowjackets” in 2023, voiced by Elijah Wood.
The story of an emblematic song from the musical
During its creation, “A Little Night Music” had arrived at rehearsals with some of the libretto and score unfinished, including a solo song for Johns. Director Hal Prince suggested that she and her co-star Len Cariou improvise a scene or two to give librettist Hugh Wheeler some ideas.
“Hal said, ‘Why don’t you just say what you feel?'” he recalled in that AP interview. “When Len and I did that, Hal called Steve Sondheim on the phone and said, ‘I think you better get in a cab and come over here and watch what they’re doing because you’re going to get the idea for the song.’ Glynis’s solo.
Johns belonged to the fourth generation of an English theatrical family. His father, Mervyn Johns, had a long career as a character actor and his mother was a pianist. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa, where his parents were on tour at the time of his birth.
Johns was a dancer at 12 and an actress at 14 in London’s West End. Her breakthrough role was as the amorous siren in the title of the hit comedy “Miranda” from 1948.
“I was quite an athlete, my muscles were strong from dancing, so the tail was good; I swam like a porpoise,” she told Newsday in 1998. In 1960’s “The Sundowners,” with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum, She was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress (she lost to Shirley Jones in “Elmer Gantry”).
Her other notable roles include the mother in “Mary Poppins,” the film that introduced audiences to Julie Andrews and where she sang the moving tune “Sister Suffragette.” She also starred in the 1989 Broadway revival of “The Circle,” W. Somerset Maugham’s romantic comedy regarding love, marriage and fidelity, alongside Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger.
Glynis Johns, with Jean Simmons, another star of old Hollywood. Archyde.com Photo
“I have retired many times. My personal life has preceded my work. Theater is just a part of my life. I probably use my higher sense of intelligence, so I have to go back to it to realize that I have the talent. “I’m not that good at doing anything else,” she told the AP.
To prepare for “A Coffin in Egypt,” Horton Foote’s 1998 play regarding a grande dame recalling her life on and off a ranch in Texas, he asked the Texas-born Foote to make a short tape of him himself reading a few lines and used him as his coach.
In a 1991 revival of “A Little Night Music” in Los Angeles, she played Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s mother, the role she had created. In 1963, she starred in her own television comedy “Glynis.”
Johns lived all over the world and had four husbands. The first was the father of her only child, Gareth Forwood, an actor who died in 2007.
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