As we all enjoy images of a joyous, 97-year-old, Dick Van Dyke wandering around Disneyland this week, it is worth noting that he is not the most senior Disney Legend. That particular honor goes to a woman with almost as legendary a career as our friend Bert the Chimney Sweep, a woman who turned 100 years old today, Glynis Johns.
Johns began her career in the 1920s as an almost impossibly beautiful stage actor who, after proving her mastery of a wide variety of roles, began to emerge as a brilliant comic performer much in demand for film. From 1938–1969 hardly a year passes within which Johns is not featured in a movie — often several — all the while maintaining a steady presence on both the British and American stage.
Johns made her first two films for the Walt Disney Company in 1953, The Sword and the Rose and Rob Roy, the Highland Rogue. Within a few years, she gave her two most iconic film performances, one for Disney and the other for Paramount: Maid Jean, the rebel captain, in the classic 1955 Danny Kaye film, The Court Jester, and then her broadly comic take as Winifred Banks, the protesting Suffragette mother in Mary Poppins (1964).
As iconic as these two roles and films were, however, her most significant impact in the arts may have come on stage a few years later in Stephen Sondheim’s Broadway hit, A Little Night Music.
Johns had been chosen for the role of the glamorous actress, Desiree, because of her mastery of delicate light comedy which Sondheim recognized did not normally go hand-in-hand with the skills of the extensively trained singers that the rest of his complicated score would require. His intention was that she was to sing hardly at all.
As the production was being shaped in rehearsal, director Hal Prince had rearranged a scene which Sondheim had intended to be a focus on Len Cariou’s Fredrik to, instead, highlight the melancholic plight of his lover, Desiree. Prince then asked Sondheim to give her a song. Quickly realizing that, while Johns was not a powerful singer, her voice had a special quality that he could work with, he began writing.
“She had a small but silvery voice that was musical and smokily pure.” — Stephen Sondheim
Recognizing that she could not sustain long phrases, he decided to build the song as a series of short questions: “Isn’t it rich?” “Aren’t we a pair?”
“Her strengths and weaknesses are built into the song.” — Jonathan Tunick, Orchestrator for the original Broadway Production of A Little Night Music
Describing it as one of the quickest pieces he’d ever composed, Sondheim wrote, for Glynis Johns, Send in the Clowns.
“The song sat so well in Glynis’ voice that at the recording session, even though she’d never recorded a song before, she did it perfectly in one take.
I’ve heard it sung since by many fine singers, but to me her version is the most satisfying.” — Stephen Sondheim
Glynis Johns was named a Disney Legend in 1998 and made her final film (so far) the following year.
Happy birthday to the legend, Glynis Johns.
A few recommendations from Glynis Johns’ filmography:
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Kelly McCubbin is a columnist for Boardwalk Times
