Glynis Johns, Mary Poppins star who first sang Sondheim’s Send in the Clowns, dies at 100
NEW YORK, United States (AP) — Glynis Johns, a Tony Award-winning stage and screen star who played the mother opposite Julie Andrews in the classic movie Mary Poppins and introduced the world to the bittersweet standard-to-be Send in the Clowns by Stephen Sondheim, has died.
She was 100.
Mitch Clem, her manager, said she died Thursday at an assisted living home in Los Angeles of natural causes.
“Today’s a sad day for Hollywood,” Clem said. “She is the last of the last of old Hollywood.”
Johns was known to be a perfectionist about her profession — precise, analytical, and opinionated. The roles she took had to be multifaceted. Anything less was giving less than her all.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on only one level,” she told The Associated Press in 1990. “The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to 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 show’s hit song Send in the Clowns to suit her distinctive husky voice, but she lost the part in the 1977 film version to Elizabeth Taylor.
“I’ve had other songs written for me, but nothing like that,” Johns told AP in 1990. “It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theatre.”
Johns was the fourth generation of an English theatrical family. Her father, Mervyn Johns, had a long career as a character actor and her mother was a pianist. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, because her parents were visiting the area on tour at the time of her birth.
Other highlights include playing the mother in Mary Poppins, the movie that introduced Julie Andrews and where she sang the rousing tune Sister Suffragette. She also starred in the 1989 Broadway revival of The Circle, W Somerset Maugham’s romantic comedy about love, marriage and fidelity, opposite Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger.
“I’ve retired many times. My personal life has come before my work. The theatre is just part of my life. It probably uses my highest sense of intelligence, so therefore I have to come back to it, to realise that I’ve got the talent. I’m not as good doing anything else,” she told the AP.
Johns lived all around the world and had four husbands. The first was the father of her only child, the late Gareth Forwood, an actor who died in 2007.
