Celia Johnson

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Birth name Celia Elizabeth Johnson
Nationality United-kingdom
Birth 18 december 1908
Death 26 april 1982 (at 73 years) at Nettlebed (United-kingdom)

Dame Celia Elizabeth Johnson DBE (18 December 1908 – 26 April 1982) was an English actress.

She began her stage acting career in 1928, and subsequently achieved success in West End and Broadway productions. She also appeared in several films, including the romantic drama Brief Encounter (1945), for which she received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actress. She was nominated for BAFTA Awards on five occasions, and won twice, for her work in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), and for the television production Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont, a BBC Play for Today broadcast in 1973.

Much of her later work was for television, and she continued performing in theatre for the rest of her life. She suffered a stroke and died soon after at the age of 73.

Biography

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 had three children:

Nicholas 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, former foreign editor of the news magazine The Economist, now writer-at-large for the publication; the couple has three children. 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, the two sisters, Kate Grimond and Lucy Fleming, have co-owned the Ian Fleming estate.

Celia 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 Understanding 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.