So she wasn’t my first choice for today; that’s fine. And I made the conscious decision yesterday not to end 2016 with either of the pair of obituaries I could have written. I just couldn’t face it again. But I knew for a week who my backup choice for today was, and I just hadn’t been telling anyone because I was afraid I’d lose two people the week I was going to write about them for the first time ever, and I couldn’t face the idea. As it is, we’ll have to live with the fact that I lost the person I was going to write about two weeks in a row, as next week was going to be Tyrus Wong.
Still, Glynis Johns. The fact is, I remember her at two very distinct periods in her career, and it took until my annual Christmas viewing of The Ref to realize that she was the same person. I’d pieced together that the mom from Mary Poppins was the same as the love interest from The Court Jester, but aligning both of those with the evil grandmother from The Ref took longer. Once I worked that out, and once I found out she was still alive, I knew she had to get on the list, and I figured better sooner than later; the woman’s 93!
I’ll freely admit that those three movies are most of what I know her from. On the other hand, Stephen Sondheim wrote “Send in the Clowns” for her, and the Shermans wrote “Sister Sufragette” for her. (Yeah, the Shermans are still Mary Poppins, but work with me, here.) She didn’t have a light, lovely voice, but she did have a distinctive one, with a lot of power and emotion behind it. It’s not that Hermione Gignold was a bad Madame Armfeldt, necessarily, and certainly she wasn’t the worst part of that production, but one rather wonders why you’d bother recasting.
It’s also true that those are three very different roles. (Madame Armfeldt is an odd sort of cross between Winifred Banks and Rose Chasseur, if you think about it.) Maid Jean is driven but quick-thinking and utterly sensible. Winifred Banks is scatter-brained but loving, passionate about her cause and confident in her status. Rose Chasseur is pinching, demanding, and bitter, utterly fearless but utterly without compassion. There are glimpses of each woman in the others, but the final product of each is almost irreconcilable, except for the part where they’re all played by Glynis Johns.
She seems to have retired after 1999’s Superstar, which adds her to the list of “people with a really weird last movie.” While You Were Sleeping would have been charming, and The Ref would have been dynamic. But, sure, people make the choices they do. And arguably, it doesn’t matter what film specifically was her final choice, because she’ll always be remembered for the ones that came before. And for “Send in the Clowns,” a not inappropriate way to ring in 2017 all by itself.
