Background
Celia Johnson was born on 18 December 1908 in Richmond upon Thames, United Kingdom.
Celia Johnson was born on 18 December 1908 in Richmond upon Thames, United Kingdom.
There’s the germ of a comic character there, and it may be regretted that Celia |olmson never got enough chances to be funny. Her Laura Jesson in Brief Encounter (45, David Lean)—far and away her best known film—is resigned to home life, and her romance may only flourish in the steadfast assurance that it can never be lived. Roger Manvell once wrote of that performance: “I do not remember any more moving performance ... I do not remember a moment when [her] performance falters in a part where over- plaving or false intonations would have turned the film from a study of life itself into another piece of cinematic fiction. . . . She looks quite ordinary until it is time for her to look like what she feels."
That last observation is acute, but it points to the ways in which Noel Coward's script and Lean’s direction are forlornly sure about what must happen. Her alive look is a bird whose flight is so short-lived that a life of regret is guaranteed thereafter. So the love storv is faintly masochistic and a little self-righteous.
Ms. Johnsons understatement did nothing to disturb that, or to suggest that Laura might end up crazy. If the film had let the love story be disruptive it would have been truer to the volatile England of 1945, and the film might seem less preciously jeweled and contained. But, for that, the bogus cover of the dull, decent husband would have had to be blown. Brief Encounter will not risk that: Coward’s gayness was too tolerant of such holkwv men. Thus, the brevity of the encounter is desperately necessary to the shaky upper lip.
Brief Encounter did not make her a film actress. After the war, she remained most notable theatrically, in Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea, William Douglas Home’s The Reluctant Debutante, and Robert Bolt’s Flowering Chernj. She played in The Three Sisters and The Chernj Orchard, too, but made the latter seem a little too suburban.
Her other movies were In Which We Serve (42, Lean and Coward); Dear Octopus (42, Harold French); This Happy Breed (44, Lean); The Astonished Heart (50, Terence Fisher and Anthony Darnborough); / Believe In You (51, Basil Dearden); The Captain’s Paradise (53, Anthony Kinnnins); The Holly and the Ivy (54, George More O’Ferrall); A Kid for Two Farthings (55, Carol Reed); and The Good Companions (56, J. Lee Thompson). The modulated acid of her headmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (68, Ronald Neame) revealed her at last as a character actress.
She was not seen much more, but she was in Les Miserables (78, Glenn Jordan) for TV; The Hostage Tower (80, Claudio Guzman); and playing with Trevor Howard once more in Staying On (82, Silvio Narizzano).
In the 1930s, Celia Johnson was one of the most promising young actresses on the London stage, someone ranked with Peggy Ashcroft and Diana Wynyard. But she did not play too many of the great roles; nor did she have the push or vanity to make herself great. She was, famously, more interested in domestic life, no matter that she was often brilliant on stage and usually less than competent at home. (She once insisted to the management on a certain actor for one of her plays because he lived near her, and could give her a lift home every night.)