The actor Tony Britton has died at 95. Simon Williams remembers Celia Johnson, who acted on stage and screen with Britton
My wife, Lucy Fleming, and I have just returned from a short season off-Broadway with Posting Letters To The Moon, a selection of the funny and touching war-time letters of her parents, Celia Johnson and Peter Fleming.
One of the slides we use is of Celia in the first stage production of Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca; it shows her cowering from Margaret Rutherford’s fearsome Mrs Danvers. ‘Celia is the one on the left,’ I quipped each night, my only mother-in-law joke. Although she wasn’t technically - Lucy and I didn’t actually marry till after her death in 1982, aged 73.
Whenever my father, the actor/playwright Hugh Williams finished a new play, he would always send it to Celia first. ‘She’d be perfect in it,’ he’d say.
She was every producer’s go-to star. My father first worked with Celia in Pride and Prejudice in 1935, as Darcy to her Elizabeth. When they did his play, The Grass is Greener, together in 1956, I often visited backstage and was always told, ‘You’ve just missed Lucy.’ (A recurring theme of my life.) Celia had two daughters, I’d heard: Kate who was graceful and brainy and Lucy, a pony-crazed tomboy who wanted to be an actress. She sounded perfect to me.
Everyone had fun working with Celia. It was poor form in those days to take acting too seriously – if it didn’t look effortless, you weren’t working hard enough. In one scene with Dad, she had the line, ‘Who the hell do you think you are – the Count of Monte Cristo?’ One night, she got it tangled up and came out with an unprintable spoonerism - much giggling.
Lucy and I eventually met in 1968, playing brother and sister in Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, with her mum as the theatrical matriarch, Judith Bliss. In the first scene, I had to light a cigarette for Celia and put it into her hand as she passed. At the dress rehearsal, without our glasses on, it was chaos with me myopically galumphing across the stage after her to dock the cigarette between her fingers – a very happy production.
Of course I fell instantly for Lucy – the way everyone did – but somehow I missed the elusive ‘right moment’ to own up; it might have ruined things if I had. We became good friends until later on.
When Celia got wind that we had upgraded our friendship, she picked her moment perfectly for a chat. Fixing me with those huge eyes, she warned me very sweetly that if I messed her daughter about, she’d kill me, adding, ‘Your father was a terrible rogue.’
Noël Coward raved about Celia’s skill, she served him well in three war-time films including the Brief Encounter (1945) with Trevor Howard, of whom she wrote with horror, ‘He’s eight years younger than me.’ Coward’s only caveat was Celia’s ‘maddening habit of having babies.’
In her acting, she had a lightning speed of thought – she could turn on an emotional sixpence. In particular she excelled at being confused or outraged. A renowned Timescrossword addict, she would leave the stage with the audience sobbing or laughing, pick up the paper in the wings and say, ‘I’ve got it – 22 down.’
When curtain-up on the first night of The Kingfisher had to be delayed for an hour because of the three-day week in 1974, the stage manager found her and Ralph Richardson drinking gin and calmly playing honeymoon bridge backstage.
After she left RADA, a producer asked her if there were any weak points in her acting and she told him, ‘I’m not very good at old men.’ Like all actors, she chose to remember only her bad reviews (they were scarce). Her favourite was for her Juliet on BBC Radio when she was 41 . It read, ‘Old actress ruins play.’
