Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson (18 December 1908 – 26 April 1982) was an English actress, whose career included stage, television and film. She is especially known for her roles in the films In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944), Brief Encounter (1945) and The Captain's Paradise (1953). For Brief Encounter, she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress. A six-time BAFTA Award nominee, she won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

Johnson began her stage acting career in 1928, and subsequently achieved success in West End and Broadway productions. She continued performing in theatre for the rest of her life, though much of her later work was in television, including winning the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC Play for Today, Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1973). She suffered a stroke in 1982 and died later the same day, aged 73.

Early life and education

Born in Richmond, Surrey, and nicknamed "Betty", Johnson was the second daughter of John Robert Johnson and Ethel (née Griffiths) Johnson. Her first public performance was in 1916, when she played a role in a charity performance of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid to raise funds for returned First World War soldiers.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School in London from 1919 until 1926, and played the oboe in the school's orchestra under Gustav Holst. She acted in school productions, but had no other acting experience, when she was accepted to study at Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in 1926, where she was in the same class as Margaretta Scott. She later spent a term in Paris, studying under Pierre Fresnay at the Comédie Française. She later recalled her choice of an acting career with the comment, "I thought I'd rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked." She married the journalist Peter Fleming in 1935, and in 1939 gave birth to their first child, a son. which allowed her to devote time to her family and her work for the Women's Auxiliary Police Corps. As a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company, Johnson appeared in the plays The Master Builder (1964) (with Olivier) and Hay Fever (1965), and later reprised her roles in the television productions.

  • Kate Fleming (born 1946), now Kate Grimond, is married to John Grimond (son of politician Jo Grimond), former foreign editor of the news magazine The Economist, now writer-at-large for the publication; the couple have three children. She is the author of Celia Johnson: A Biography (1991).<!-- ISBN needed -->
  • Lucy Fleming (born Eve Lucinda Fleming, 15 May 1947), is an actress. In the 1970s she starred as Jenny in the BBC's apocalyptic fiction series Survivors. She is married to the actor and writer Simon Williams.

Since the late 1990s, the two sisters, Kate Grimond and Lucy Fleming, have co-owned the Ian Fleming estate.

Johnson distanced herself from her acting career while her children were young, preferring to devote her attention to her family. She was described as a woman "always ready to laugh" and "maternal in a light-hearted way" and her daughter recalled that she was often torn between her desire to care for her family and her need to be involved in the "mechanics" of acting.

thumb|right|Blue plaque for Dame Celia Johnson

Legacy

On 18 December 2008, to mark the centenary of her birth, a blue plaque was unveiled at her childhood home in Richmond. Among the guests at the ceremony were her daughters, Lucy Fleming and Kate Grimond. In The Times, Grimond noted that the "tragedy of theatre" is that even the best performances fade from memory, and that her mother's current reputation rests almost entirely on her performance in Brief Encounter. Grimond noted that the advent of video allowed the film to be seen by a new audience, and that modern appraisals of the film had led to its being regarded as a classic., and as Cecily on the all-star 1953 recording of The Importance of Being Earnest (with John Gielgud and Edith Evans).

References

Further reading

  • Douglas-Home, William. "Johnson, Dame Celia Elizabeth (1908–1982)." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004. (accessed 4 January 2009).
  • Stage performances in Theatre Archive University of Bristol
  • Celia Johnson bio