Scotsman Obituaries: Glynis Johns, actress best known as suffragette mother in Mary Poppins

By the start of her teens Johns was dancing professionally, she achieved film stardom as the eponymous mermaid in Miranda in the 1940s, she was the strident suffragette mum Mrs Banks in Disney’s Mary Poppins in the 1960s and she played Molly Shannon’s grandmother in the comedy Superstar in 1999, with Will Ferrell.

Johns enjoyed success both on screen and in the theatre. Stephen Sondheim’s poignant ballad Send in the Clowns was written for her, and specifically for her rather limited vocal range. And it was written when rehearsals were already well under way for the 1973 Broadway hit A Little Night Music.

“We were already in rehearsal and Steve wrote it overnight,” said Johns. He played it next morning on the piano and it was just perfect, the simplest thing he has ever written. I knew after one or two bars that it was a wonderful song and I couldn’t stop the tears rolling down my cheeks.”

Twenty years later New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini wrote: “Sondheim composed his most famous song Send In the Clowns for an actress with virtually no voice, Glynis Johns, and few genuine singers have performed it as effectively.”

Johns won a Tony award for her performance as a character who realises she is in love only after her suitor has moved on to someone else. Elizabeth Taylor was a bigger star and got the role in the film version, but was panned by the critics.

Glynis Margaret Payne Johns was born in Pretoria, South Africa, in 1923, while her parents were on tour. Her father was the Welsh actor Mervyn Johns, star of Went the Day Well? and Dead of Night. Her mother, Alys Steele-Payne, was a concert pianist, originally from Australia.

She was a proficient ballet dancer from a very early age and was dancing in a revue called Buckie’s Bears at the Garrick Theatre in London at the age of 11, though she would later admit that as a child what she really wanted to be when she grew up was a scientist.

In 1936 she played Napoleon’s daughter in the Old Vic play St Helena. The following year she appeared in a West End production of The Children’s Hour, Lill­ian Hellman’s controversial play with a lesbian theme, though many did not realise it, including the young Glynis Johns herself.

Johns made her film debut at 14 as country squire Ralph Richardson’s daughter in South Riding and she got a break a few years later when she took over from Elisabeth Bergner in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s war film 49th Parallel after it had completed initial location shooting in Canada.

The film was conceived as propaganda to encourage the United States to join the Second World War and starred Laurence Olivier. As a German national, Bergner felt safer staying in North America than returning to England, where a German invasion seemed imminent and she might face a treason charge. Her departure opened the door for Johns.

But it was her role as the flirtatious mermaid in Miranda in 1948 that really propelled Johns to stardom. In the early 1950s she starred in The Sword and the Rose and Rob Roy – The Highland Rogue, both of which were made by Walt Disney. The relationship between actress and film company would be renewed a decade later when she was cast in the Oscar-winning family favourite Mary Poppins, with Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke.

Although most of her roles were in comedies and light dramas, Johns did secure an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress as an innkeeper in Fred Zinnemann’s Australian drama The Sundowners.

By the mid-1960s she was sufficiently well-established in the US to be given her own sitcom, called Glynis, in which she was an amateur sleuth, though it lasted only one season. She also guested as the villain Lady Penelope Peasoup on the camp Batman TV series.

Johns was 50 by the time of A Little Night Music and she scaled back her workload after that, though she did continue to appear in films, television and theatre occasionally.

She played barmaid Diane’s mother in the first series of Cheers in 1983 and returned to Broadway in 1989 in a production of Somerset Maugham’s The Circle, with Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger.

She was married and divorced four times, firstly in her teens to Anthony Forwood, who was later Dirk Bogarde’s partner. She subsequently married David Foster, who later became chairman of Colgate-Palmolive, businessman Cecil Henderson and novelist Elliott Arnold.

Gareth Forwood, a son from her first marriage, was also an actor. He died in 2007. She is survived by a grandson and three great-grandchildren.

Obituaries

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