NEW YORK.- Glynis Johns, una estrella Tony Award-winning stage and screen actress who starred opposite Julie Andrews in the classic film Mary Poppins and presented to the world the bittersweet song Send in the Clowns by Stephen Sondheim, has passed away. He is 100 years old.
Mitch Clem, his manager, said he died Thursday at a nursing home in los angeles due to natural causes. “Today is a sad day for Hollywood”, Clem said. “She is the last of the last of old Hollywood.”
Johns was known for being a perfectionist in her profession: precise, analytical and opinionated. The roles she assumed must be multifaceted. She just knew how to give it her all.
“As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing a monochrome role,” she told The Associated Press in 1990. “The goal of a first-class performance is to make it real. It’s going to be real. And I have to make sense of it on my own.” mind to make it real.”
Johns’ greatest triumph was playing Desiree Armfeldt in A Little Night Musicfor which he won a Tony in 1973. Sondheim wrote the hit song for the play Send in the Clowns to accommodate her distinctive husky voice, but Johns lost the role in the 1977 film version starring Elizabeth Taylor.
“They wrote other songs for me, but nothing like that,” Johns told the AP in 1990. “It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theater.”
Career in Hollywood and Broadway
Others who performed Sondheim’s famous song were 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 its creation, A Little Night Music He had arrived at his rehearsals with part 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 to the AP. “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 age 12 and actress at 14 in London’s West End. Her breakthrough role was that of the amorous siren in the title of the hit comedy Miranda of 1948.
“I was quite an athlete, my muscles were strong from dancing, so the tail was fine; I swam like a porpoise,” she told Newsday in 1998. In The Sundowners, from 1960, with Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum, was nominated for an Oscar for best supporting actress. Lost to Shirley Jones in Elmer Gantry.
Her other notable roles include the mother in Mary Poppinsthe film that introduced Julie Andrews to the public and where she sang the moving melody Sister Suffragette. He also starred in the 1989 Broadway revival of The CircleW. Somerset Maugham’s romantic comedy about love, marriage and fidelity, opposite Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger.
Personal life
“I’ve retired many times. My personal life has preceded my work. Theater is just a part of my life. It probably uses my highest sense of intelligence, so I have to come back to it to realize that I have talent. I’m not that good at doing anything else,” she told the AP.
To prepare for A Coffin in EgyptHorton Foote’s 1998 play about a grand dame recalling her life on and off a ranch in Texas, asked the Texas-born Foote to record a short tape of himself reading a few lines and used it as his coach.
In a revival of A Little Night Music In 1991 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.
FUENTE: AP
