A rubber tail, custom-made by Dunlop Rubber, sounds like a prop from a seaside novelty act. Yet that tail carried Glynis Johns, the British actress born in Pretoria on 5 October 1923, into one of the strangest star-making roles of postwar British cinema. She played Miranda Trewella, a mermaid who flirts, schemes and refuses to be ordinary, in the comedy Miranda. The tail was ordered by producer Betty Box, and it turned a whimsical idea into a hit that made Glynis Johns a name audiences remembered.
A family of performers
She came by performance honestly. Her father, Mervyn Johns, was a Welsh actor and a star of British films; her mother, Alice Steele, was an Australian-born concert pianist. On her mother's side, Glynis Johns was the fourth generation to step onto a stage, and her maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Steele-Payne, had been one of the first women virtuoso violinists. The family returned to England a few months after Glynis was born, carrying that inheritance with them.
The stage found her early, and she was ready for it. At five she entered a London ballet school. By six, Britain was calling her a dance prodigy, and by twelve she held a teaching diploma in dance. Along the way she collected around twenty-five gold medals. That training gave her something rarer than technique: a physical confidence that let her play a mermaid in a rubber tail, or a mother in a musical, without ever seeming to strain for effect.
Mary Poppins and a husky voice
Miranda made her a film star, but Hollywood came later, and so did the part that would define her voice. In 1964 she played Mrs Winifred Banks in Mary Poppins, the distracted suffragette mother who sings about votes for women while the household falls apart around her. The Sherman Brothers wrote Sister Suffragette specifically for Glynis Johns, shaping the song around a voice that was already famous for being husky and breathy. She did not need to belt; she needed to sound like a woman mid-protest, mid-chaos, mid-life.
That voice became the whole point of her next great role. In 1973 she opened on Broadway in A Little Night Music as Desiree Armfeldt, a touring actress who has loved badly and often. Stephen Sondheim wrote Send In the Clowns for her, not for a singer with a big range but for an actress with a small, worn, expressive instrument. The song is built on short phrases and long pauses, and Glynis Johns filled those pauses with the sound of someone who has stopped pretending. She won a Tony Award for the role, and the song became hers in a way few show tunes ever belong to one performer.
Stephen Sondheim wrote Send In the Clowns for her, not for a singer with a big range but for an actress with a small, worn, expressive instrument.
She was not a conventional leading lady, and her career never settled into one shape. She moved from British stage to film, from Hollywood to her own sitcom, from musicals to Disney legend status. She married four times and had one son, the actor Gareth Forwood. But the thread through all of it was that voice: a little rough, a little breathless, always recognisable. It is why a song about clowns and timing still sounds like a confession when she sings it.
Glynis Johns died on 4 January 2024 in Los Angeles, aged 100. She had outlived most of her contemporaries and several of her own eras. But the image that stays is not the mermaid tail or the suffragette sash. It is a woman on a bare stage, singing Send In the Clowns in a voice that sounds like it has already lived every word.