Celia Johnson - Personal Life

Personal Life

Johnson was married to Peter Fleming from 1936 until Fleming's death in 1971, while on a shooting expedition near Glencoe in Argyll, Scotland. Fleming was the brother of the James Bond creator Ian Fleming.

They were the parents of three children.

• Nicholas "Nichol" Peter Val Fleming (3 January 1939 – 9 May 1995), spent most of his life at the Fleming family home in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire, as a farmer. He was also a journalist, and the author of thriller novels published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and a non fiction historical work, August 1939. From his early twenties, he lived with his partner Christopher Balfour, a merchant banker.

• Kate Fleming (born 1946), now Kate Grimond, is married to John Grimond, foreign editor of the news magazine The Economist. They have three children, Mary, Georgia and Rose. Fleming is the author of Celia Johnson: A Biography (1991)

• Lucy Fleming (born Eve Lucinda Fleming, 15 May 1947), now Lucy Williams, 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, Kate Grimond and Lucy Fleming have been the co-owners of 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.

In 1982, she was touring with Sir Ralph Richardson in Angela Huth's The Gathering and the play's West End run had been announced. On one of her days off, she was at her home in Nettlebed, Oxfordshire playing bridge with friends, when she collapsed from a stroke. She died a few hours later in her home. She left an estate worth £150,557.