Actress Glynis Johns, “Mary Poppins” actress and star of the Hollywood musical, has died at the age of 100

Glynis Johnsstar of the classic film “Mary Poppins,” died this Thursday at 100 years. This was confirmed by Mitch Clem, his manager, who explained that his death occurred in a nursing home in Los Angeles and was due to natural causes.

“Today is a sad day for Hollywood,” Clem said, according to the AP agency. “She is the last of the last of old Hollywood.”

Johns was born in Pretoria, South Africa, and was the daughter of actor Mervyn Johns, in a family of theatrical lineage. She came to the big screen as a teenager and over the course of her career became a star of stage and screen. One of her most remembered roles is the one she had in the original Mary Poppins, the Disney production directed by Robert Stevenson and which enchanted entire generations.

There he starred alongside the protagonist Julie Andrews. She played the role of Winifred Banks, the mother of the children Mary Poppins cared for. That wasn’t her only achievement: She marveled at the bittersweet song “Send in the Clowns,” which Stephen Sondheim wrote especially for her in the musical “A Little Night Music,” though it would later be omitted from the version cinematic.

“For me, I’m not interested in playing a monochromatic role,” he said in 1990. “The goal of a first-class performance is to make it real. To be real. And I have to make it feel in my mind so that it’s real.

Johns’ greatest triumph was playing Desiree Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” for which she won a Tony in 1973. Sondheim wrote the hit song “Send in the Clowns” to suit her distinctive raspy voice, but in 1977 Johns lost the role in the film version starring Elizabeth Taylor.

“They’ve written me other songs, but nothing like this,” Johns confessed. “It’s the greatest gift they’ve given me in 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.

The story of an emblematic song from the musical

During its creation, “A Little Night Music” had arrived at rehearsals with some of the booklet and score unfinished, including a solo song for Johns. Director Hal Prince suggested that she and 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 in that AP interview. “When Len and I did it, Hal called Steve Sondheim on the phone and said, ‘I think you’d better get a cab and come over here and see what they’re doing because you’ll get the idea for the song.’ solo by Glynis.

Johns was 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 touring at the time of his birth.

Johns was a dancer at 12 and an actress at 14 in London’s West End. Her decisive role was that of the amorous siren in the title of the successful comedy “Miranda” of 1948.

“I was a real athlete, my muscles were strong from dancing, so the tail was good; I swam like a porpoise,” she told Newsday in 1998. In 1960 “The Sundowners,” starring 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 that of the mother in “Mary Poppins,” the film that introduced audiences to Julie Andrews and in which she sang the touching 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, alongside Rex Harrison and Stewart Granger.

“I have retired many times. My personal life preceded my work. Theater is just a part of my life. I probably use my superior sense of intelligence, so I have to go back to it to realize that I have talent. “I’m not that good at anything else,” she told the AP.

To prepare for “A Coffin in Egypt,” Horton Foote’s 1998 play about a grande dame reminiscing about her life on and off a ranch in Texas, he asked the Texas-born Foote to do a short tape in which he himself read some lines and used him as his coach.

In a 1991 revival of “A Little Night Music” in Los Angeles, she played Madame Armfeldt, Desiree’s mother, the role she had created. In 1963, she starred in her 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.