The headlines announcing the death of actress Glynis Johns at the ripe old age of 100 tended to focus on her 1964 appearance as Mrs. Banks (both a mom and a daffy suffragette) in Disney’s mega-musical, Mary Poppins. Sevcral newspapers, notably the New York Times, spotlighted her as a Tony-winner for her 1973 role in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, in which she introduced the poignant “Send in the Clowns.” But her stage and screen successes started early. Coming from a long line of performers on both sides of the family, she made her British stage debut at age 12. In 1936, she played the trouble-making schoolgirl at the heart of Lillian Hellman’s bold-for-its-time The Children’s Hour. Her move into movies came in 1938: film brought her roles that were both dramatic and comedic. By 1949 she was starring in a British fantasy called Miranda that today sounds uncannily like the Tom Hanks-Daryl Hannah 1984 romance, Splash. Playing a mermaid who comes ashore to see London, she was highly praised by New York critic Bosley Crowther, who gushed, “Glynis Johns is bewitching — one half of her is, at least — as the coyly flirtatious finny creature.”
She made her Hollywood screen debut circa 1950, again being cast in a wide variety of roles. Though comedy was her forte, she was Oscar-nominated as a talkative innkeeper in a major 1960 drama set in the Australian Outback, The Sundowners. My own first screen encounter with Johns came when I was a small girl delighting in Danny Kaye’s funniest movie, The Court Jester (1955). This is a mock-medieval romance in which Kaye’s meek character is persuaded to masquerade as the king’s jester in order to overthrow a usurper to England’s royal throne. The film is enlivened by hilarious wordplay I can still recite (“The pellet with the poison's in the vessel with the pestle,” and so on). There’s also some wacky jousting and an unforgettable sword-fight in which Kaye’s character, dueling the great Basil Rathbone in his final onscreen bout, swerves madly back and forth between timid and bold,
In the Court Jester there are two important female characters. Angela Lansbury plays Gwendolyn, an imperious English princess with eyes for the jester. Johns is Maid Jean, one of the rebels dedicated to removing the usurper from the throne. As a small girl, I was confused. Jean seemed both bold and smart, admirable qualities, to be sure. And she had a wonderful throaty speaking voice I instinctively liked. Yet Gwendolyn was a princess, and (more than that) a tall blonde. So familiar was I with the social norms of the era that I figured she’d be the one who’d end up with the guy. Happily, though, it turns out to be the short(er) brunette who gets her man. Here, for a change, was a case in which blondes don’t have more fun.
Some twenty years later, Johns IS a blonde, and she too is apparently unlucky in love. (In real life, she was married and divorced four times.) On-stage, in A Little Night Music, she originated the role of Desiree Armfeldt, a celebrated stage actress whose multiple romantic affairs never pave the way for a permanent union with the one man she wants. In compensation, she gets perhaps the most memorable song in the Sondheim canon, a rueful acknowledgment of where her life has led. It was written in a limited range to accommodate Johns’ modest vocal powers while giving her a chance to convey strong emotion. Though many famous singers have recorded it, Sondheim insisted that Johns’ original version was his very favorite.
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