Glynis Johns, Tony Award-winning stage and screen star who played the children’s mother in the film Mary Poppins has died at 100 years.
Mitch Clem, his manager, has confirmed that he died on Thursday at a nursing home in Los Angeles. due to natural causes.
Johns was known for being a perfectionist in his profession: precise, analytical and opinionated. The roles she took on had to be multifaceted. “As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on any one level,” she told The Associated Press in 1990. “The goal of a first-class performance is to make it real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind to make it real.”
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 12 and an actress at 14 in London’s West End. Her decisive role was that of the amorous mermaid in the title of the hit comedy Miranda of 1948.