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Glynis Johns, an actress who turned a British movie star within the late Nineteen Forties taking part in a flirty mermaid named Miranda, portrayed a singing suffragist within the Disney musical “Mary Poppins” and gained a Tony Award within the musical “A Little Night time Music,” the place she launched Stephen Sondheim’s customary “Ship within the Clowns,” died Jan. 4 at an assisted dwelling house in Los Angeles. She was 100.
Her supervisor, Mitch Clem, confirmed the loss of life however didn’t present a selected trigger.
Ms. Johns’s effervescence and crackling husky voice — which she attributed to “barely twisted” vocal cords that permitted the air to hit “the soprano and the contralto on the similar time” — made her a particular presence in practically 60 movies, dozens of TV appearances and scores of theatrical productions.
Movie historian David Shipman as soon as described Ms. Johns, along with her mix of intercourse attraction and quirky attraction, as “one of many extra entrancing heroines of the ’40s, one of many only a few in British movies who knew the way to play comedy.” She turned a prime field workplace attract England however discovered little pleasure in stardom, telling a reporter: “It isn’t a pleasing approach of incomes a dwelling. . . . It has made me ailing, exhausted and sad.”
She attributed the failure of at the very least one in all her 4 marriages to the pressures of being a number one woman and, by the early Sixties, she settled into an extended and diverse profession as a personality actress, enlivening even middling fare along with her offbeat attract.
Ms. Johns represented the fourth era in a present enterprise household. Her mother and father, who have been touring in South Africa with a musical revue when she was born, settled in England, the place Ms. Johns studied ballet so intensely that she earned a instructing certificates at age 10. Her china-blue eyes, her athleticism and her voice (“like honey over graham crackers,” one arts author enthused) propelled her stage and movie profession.
After a number of juvenile on-screen roles, she achieved breakthrough stardom with “Miranda” (1948) as a fishtailed seductress whose flowing blond hair offers strategic cowl of her higher physique.
The movie, a comic book fantasy with a sexually ahead heroine, was a industrial smash. Ms. Johns reprised the half within the 1954 Technicolor sequel, “Mad About Males,” and racked up a slew of credit in different movies, few of any consequence. But Ms. Johns was often singled out for spirited work, whether or not reverse James Stewart within the aviation drama “No Freeway within the Sky” (1951), Alec Guinness within the comedian satire “The Promoter” (1952) or Richard Todd in live-action Disney swashbucklers “The Sword and the Rose” and “Rob Roy” (each 1953).
In Hollywood, she performed a comely maiden in “The Court docket Jester” (1956), a musical comedy set in medieval England and starring Danny Kaye. That very same 12 months, she and Hermione Gingold made transient appearances as “sporting women” — prostitutes — within the all-star car “Across the World in 80 Days.”
She drew an Academy Award nomination for her supporting position as an earthy innkeeper in “The Sundowners” (1960), a drama set within the Australian outback with Robert Mitchum and Deborah Kerr.
“Mary Poppins” (1964) was a showcase for Julie Andrews because the singing English nursemaid, however Ms. Johns proved delightfully eccentric and a serviceable singer within the supporting a part of the youngsters’s mom, Mrs. Banks.
On tv, Ms. Johns starred with Keith Andes in short-lived CBS sitcom “Glynis” (1963), a couple of husband-and-wife staff of newbie sleuths, and he or she performed the henchwoman Woman Penelope Peasoup on the Sixties collection “Batman,” amongst different visitor roles. She additionally slummed in low-grade horror motion pictures, all of the whereas sustaining a vigorous theatrical profession.
The present that dominated her résumé was Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night time Music” (1973), impressed by Ingmar Bergman’s droll romantic roundelay “Smiles of a Summer time Night time” (1955). Ms. Johns had been solid because the world-weary courtesan and actress Desiree Armfeldt on the idea of her performing strengths greater than her voice.
Director and producer Harold Prince stated that the day of a preview for a VIP viewers, Sondheim got here to work bleary-eyed after an all-nighter spent writing a track: “Ship within the Clowns,” a bittersweet ballad about life’s missed probabilities. He and Ms. Johns “adored it,” Prince recalled to Sondheim biographer Meryle Secrest. “And, discuss concerning the guts of a jailbird, Glynis stated, ‘If you happen to’ll put the lyrics on a chunk of paper I’ll sing it in entrance of the viewers in the present day.’”
Sondheim later instructed Secrest he had tailor-made the track to what Secrest referred to as Ms. Johns’s “small, silvery voice” and that “no one can sing it in addition to she.” Its phrase alternative — from the well-known first line, “Isn’t it wealthy?” — made probably the most of her limits by forcing a breath after the “ch” sound.
In Sondheim’s judgment, skilled singers who later recorded it — together with Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins — have been, in impact, too skilled at easy phrasing to seize its bitter essence.
The present, which ran 601 performances, garnered 5 different Tonys along with Ms. Johns’s win for finest actress in a musical, together with finest musical. She later instructed the Related Press that “Ship within the Clowns” was “the best reward I’ve ever been given within the theater.”
Glynis Margaret Johns was born in Pretoria, South Africa, on Oct. 5, 1923. Her father was the Welsh-born actor Mervyn Johns. Her mom, Australian-born live performance pianist Alys Steele-Payne, got here from a household of entertainers.
After a number of theater roles in London, notably as a merciless pupil in Lillian Hellman’s “The Kids’s Hour,” Ms. Johns was signed to a movie contract and excelled as Ralph Richardson’s high-strung adolescent daughter in “South Using” (1938). Her profession obtained a significant increase when she appeared with Laurence Olivier in “forty ninth Parallel” (1941), as a younger Canadian Hutterite villager who encounters stranded German U-boat crew members.
Ms. Johns performed reverse her father because the daughter of a mysterious innkeeper within the ghost story “The Midway Home” (1944), and he or she introduced a cosmopolitan zest to the position of a good friend who helps liberate Kerr from the routine of married life in “Trip From Marriage” (1945).
Amongst her later supporting roles, she lent a much-needed spark to “The Chapman Report” (1962), as a poetry-spouting housewife who propositions a football-playing Adonis solely to search out him a boorish lover. She additionally transcended the lifeless comedy “Lock Up Your Daughters!” (1969) because the gleefully lecherous Mrs. Squeezum.
In a few of her last display performances, she was the callous mom of Kevin Spacey in “The Ref” (1994) and a grandmother within the Sandra Bullock romantic comedy “Whereas You Had been Sleeping” (1995).
Onstage, Ms. Johns made a powerful impression in a 1956 Broadway revival of George Bernard Shaw’s “Main Barbara,” portraying the idealistic title character reverse Charles Laughton as her munitions-maker father, and as 4 long-suffering ladies in John Mortimer’s intercourse comedy “Come As You Are,” a London hit in 1970.
Her look with Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger in a 1989 Broadway revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s romantic comedy “The Circle” was seen by critics largely as an opportunity to catch the three veteran performers — “sly previous foxes at play,” as Instances reviewer Frank Wealthy famous.
Ms. Johns, who retired in her late 70s, admitted to not feeling like a “complete particular person” offstage, and colleagues described her as insecure and even frightened when not performing. Andes, her sitcom co-star, as soon as instructed TV Information: “Glynis is a complete crowd of individuals. You’re by no means certain which one you’ll meet from hour to hour.”
Her marriages have been short-lived. Her first, to actor Anthony Forwood, took a startling flip when he left her for film star Dirk Bogarde. Her later marriages to enterprise executives David Foster and Cecil Henderson and creator Elliott Arnold led to divorce. A son from her first marriage, Gareth Forwood, died in 2007.
She had no fast survivors.
“I turned knowledgeable at 12, so it’s all the time been my life,” Ms. Johns as soon as instructed the Instances, trying again on her time as an actress.
“Afterward, I wished to guide what I considered a ‘regular’ existence, however I quickly discovered I wasn’t as regular away from the theater as in it,” she continued. “Performing is my highest type of intelligence, the time after I use the very best a part of my mind. I used to be all the time instructed, by my married buddies, for instance, that I might apply that intelligence to one thing else, another facet of dwelling, however I can’t. I don’t have the identical aptitude in different issues.”