New York. Glynis Johns, a Tony Award-winning star of stage and screen who starred opposite Julie Andrews in the classic film “Mary Poppins” and introduced the world to Stephen Sondheim's bittersweet song “Send in the Clowns,” has died. He was 100 years old.
Mitch Clem, his manager, said he died Thursday of natural causes at a nursing home in Los Angeles. “Today is a sad day for Hollywood,” Clem said. “She’s the last of the last of old Hollywood.”
Johns was known as a perfectionist in her profession: precise, analytical and opinionated. The roles he took on had to be diverse. I just knew how to do my best.
“As far as I'm concerned, I'm not interested in playing a monochromatic role,” she told The Associated Press in 1990. “The goal of a first-class performance is to make it real.” Be honest. And I have to understand it in my own head to make it a reality.”
Johns' greatest triumph was the role of 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 match her distinctive husky voice, but Johns lost the role to the 1977 film adaptation starring Elizabeth Taylor.
“They wrote other songs for me, but nothing like this,” Johns told the AP in 1990. “This is the greatest gift I have ever given to the theater.”
Others who performed Sondheim's famous song included Frank Sinatra, Judy Collins, Barbra Streisand, Sarah Vaughan and Olivia Newton-John. He also appeared in the second season of Yellowjackets in 2023, voiced by Elijah Wood.
During the creation of A Little Night Music, some parts of the booklet and score were unfinished, including a solo song for Johns, in rehearsals. 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?'” she recalled to the AP. “When Len and I were doing that, Hal called Steve Sondheim and said, 'I think you better get in a cab and come here and see what they're doing, because then you'll get the idea for the song.' .' Glynis Solo.”
Johns came from the fourth generation of an English theater 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 touring at the time of his birth.
Johns was a dancer at 12 and an actress in London's West End at 14. Her crucial role was that of the lovelorn siren in the title of the hit comedy “Miranda” from 1948.
“I was quite an athlete, my muscles were strong from dancing so the cock was good; I swam like a porpoise,” she told Newsday in 1998. She was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1960's The Sundowners, starring Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum. (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 in which she sang the moving tune “Sister Suffragette.” She also starred opposite Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger in the 1989 Broadway revival of “The Circle”, W. Somerset Maugham's romantic comedy about love, marriage and loyalty.
“I have retired many times. My personal life preceded my work. Theater is simply a part of my life. I'm probably tapping into my higher sense of intelligence, so I have to tap into that to realize I have the talent. “I’m not that good at doing anything else,” she told the AP.
In preparation for “A Coffin in Egypt,” Horton Foote's 1998 play about a grande dame recalling her life on and off a Texas ranch, he asked the Texas-born Foote to record a short tape to which he read a few lines himself and used it as his trainer.
In a 1991 revival of “A Little Night Music” in Los Angeles, she played Madame Armfeldt, Desiree's mother, the role she originated. In 1963 he starred in his own television comedy Glynis.
Johns lived all over the world and had four husbands. The first was the father of her only son, Gareth Forwood, an actor who died in 2007.