Celia Johnson - Career

Career

Her stage début, and first professional role, was as Sarah in George Bernard Shaw's Major Barbara at the Theatre Royal, Huddersfield in 1928. She went to London the following year to take the place of Angela Baddeley in the part of Currita in A Hundred Years Old, which was performed at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith.

In 1930 Johnson played in Cynara with Sir Gerald Du Maurier and Gladys Cooper. She made her first trip to the United States the following year to star as Ophelia in a New York production of Hamlet.

She returned to London, where she appeared in a number of minor productions, before establishing herself with a two year run in The Wind and the Rain (1933–35). She married the journalist Peter Fleming in 1935, and in 1939 gave birth to their first child, a son. Her theatre career flourished with her portrayals of Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1940) and the second Mrs. de Winter in Rebecca (1940); the production of the latter was halted when the theatre was destroyed by a Luftwaffe bomb in September 1940.

During World War II, Johnson lived with her widowed sister and sister-in-law and helped care for their combined seven children. Unable to commit her time to the often lengthy run of a play, Johnson preferred the less time-consuming schedules of film and radio, that allowed her to devote time to her family, and her work for the Women's Auxiliary Police Corps. She appeared in In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1944), both directed by David Lean and written by Noël Coward.

Lean and Coward sought Johnson for the next production, Brief Encounter (1945). She accepted the role with misgivings because of her family responsibilities, but was interested in the part, writing to her husband, "There is no getting away from the fact that it is a very good part and one which I should love to play. I have found myself already planning how I should play bits and how I should say lines..." A romantic drama about a conventional middle class housewife who falls in love with a doctor she meets in the refreshment room at a railway station, the film was well received, and is now regarded as a classic. Johnson was awarded the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.

After the war, Johnson concentrated on her family life, which included two daughters born in 1946 and 1947 and her occasional acting work was secondary for the following decade.

She returned to theatre in 1957, with Ralph Richardson in The Flowering Cherry. 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.

For her role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), she received the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

She was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1958, "for services to the theatre", and was raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1981.