Celia Johnson & Trevor Howard
The star of In Which We Serve and Brief Encounter was a dream mother-in-law to actor Simon Williams
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 wartime 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-inlaw joke (although she wasn’t technically my mother-in-law – Lucy and I didn’t marry till after her death in 1982 at 73.)
Whenever my father, the actor/ playwright Hugh Williams, finished a 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 1935 in Pride and Prejudice, 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 ponycrazed 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 version – to 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.’
Coward raved about Celia’s skill; she served him well in three wartime films including 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 Times crossword 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.’
In 1974, when curtain-up on the first night of The Kingfisher had to be delayed for an hour because of the three-day week, 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.’
She was modest and self-deprecating in her work and in her life. On seeing the rushes of In Which We Serve (1942) – try googling her speech to the ship’s company about being the captain’s wife, and have a hanky ready – she was disappointed. ‘I looked like a soused herring,’ she said. With the same modesty, a wartime love letter to Peter ended, ‘Don’t remember me as too nice or beautiful or funny because then you’ll be disappointed.’
She adapted quickly to the challenge of the movie camera: ‘I do like acting even in such an unsatisfactory medium as the films.’ But she found the prospect of Brief Encounter daunting. ‘It’ll be pretty unadulterated Johnson,’ she said.
Brief Encounter‘ s director, David Lean, knew he’d struck gold with Celia. She had the everywoman quality that you see in Judi Dench today – never a false note. Imagine her part played by one of the glam
pusses such as Anna Neagle or Jean Kent.
Despite the frequent parodying of period accents nowadays, Celia was not the worst offender in terms of irritatingvowel syndrome. She never pronounced ‘happy’ as ‘heppy’. Diction, like hemlines, has shifted over the years – even the plum in the mouth of our Queen has
Simon Williams and Lucy Fleming next perform Posting Letters to the Moon at the Trinity Theatre, Tunbridge Wells, on 29th September