Celia Johnson

Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson was born on 18 December 1908 in Richmond, Surrey, the second daughter of John Robert Johnson and Ethel Johnson. Known in her family as "Betty," she made her first public appearance in 1916 in a charity performance of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid, staged to raise funds for returning First World War soldiers. She attended St Paul's Girls' School in London from 1919 to 1926, where she played the oboe in the school orchestra under Gustav Holst. In 1926 she was accepted to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where her classmates included Margaretta Scott. She subsequently spent a term in Paris studying under Pierre Fresnay at the Comédie Française.

Johnson's professional stage debut came in 1928, when she played Sarah in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield. The following year she moved to London to take over from Angela Baddeley in the role of Currita in A Hundred Years Old at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith. In 1930 she appeared in Cynara alongside Sir Gerald Du Maurier and Dame Gladys Cooper. Her Broadway debut came in 1931, when she traveled to New York City to star as Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. Back in London, she consolidated her reputation with a two-year run in The Wind and the Rain from 1933 to 1935, and went on to portray Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice and the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca, both in 1940. The run of Rebecca was cut short when the theatre was destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb in September of that year.

During the Second World War, Johnson's film career advanced significantly. She appeared in In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944), both directed by David Lean from scripts by Noël Coward. Lean and Coward then cast her in Brief Encounter (1945), a romantic drama about a middle-class housewife who falls in love with a married doctor she meets at a railway station refreshment room. Johnson accepted the role despite reservations about the demands it would place on her family life. The film earned her the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She also appeared in The Captain's Paradise in 1953.

Following the war, Johnson devoted much of her attention to her family and took on acting work selectively. She returned to the stage in 1957 opposite Ralph Richardson in The Flowering Cherry and opened The Grass is Greener in 1958. As a member of Laurence Olivier's National Theatre Company, she appeared in The Master Builder in 1964, with Olivier, and in Hay Fever in 1965, later reprising both roles in television productions. Her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) brought her the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. She was a six-time BAFTA Award nominee overall and won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress for the BBC Play for Today production Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont in 1973.

Johnson was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1958 for services to the theatre and was elevated to Dame Commander in 1981. She married journalist Peter Fleming in 1935, and the couple had three children: a son, Nicholas, born in 1939, and two daughters, Kate, born in 1946, and Lucy, born in 1947. Peter Fleming died in 1971 following a heart attack during a shooting expedition near Glencoe in Argyll, Scotland. He was the brother of Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond. Their daughter Kate Fleming authored a biography of Johnson in 1991, and their daughter Lucy Fleming became an actress, known for her role in the BBC series Survivors.

In 1982 Johnson was touring with Ralph Richardson in Angela Huth's The Understanding, with a West End run already announced, when she collapsed from a stroke at her home in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, while playing bridge with friends. She died later that day, on 26 April 1982, at the age of 73. On 18 December 2008, the centenary of her birth, a blue plaque was unveiled at her childhood home in Richmond, attended by her daughters Lucy Fleming and Kate Grimond.