Celia Johnson makes a woman’s efforts to behave properly as absorbing as anything she might be tempted to do. We rate her most highly when small signs of unease let us understand how much that effort costs.
Fi1m perspective
In Brief Encounter (1945), Celia Johnson lets Laura Jesson enjoy being with Alec, then shows her questioning whether she has any right to that happiness. The pleasure barely has time to settle before she begins to worry about it. We found Laura’s anxiety almost unbearable because Johnson makes that questioning feel so immediate, even when we wish she would allow herself a little peace. Nothing about her concern for what is proper disappears simply because she has fallen in love.
The early screen partnership with director David Lean and writer Noël Coward runs through In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944) and Brief Encounter. Laura was not her only sort of ordinary woman: Ethel Gibbons in This Happy Breed is a lower-middle-class housewife. Johnson could move between social classes, though the accent in that performance occasionally wobbles.
Lean gets the fullest account of that struggle from her in Brief Encounter, though the film’s balance is imperfect. Coward gives Laura a more complicated inner life than Alec, leaving Trevor Howard to supply decency where Johnson can show conflicting impulses. We understand her so thoroughly that he can seem insufficiently known, and a little more uncertainty in him would make their meetings richer. Laura’s guilt has weight because Lean allows ordinary obligations to matter.
Her later career included selective theatre and television work. In The Holly and the Ivy (1952), the interest lies again in her ability to make goodness touching without making it dull. As Miss Mackay, the headmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), she offers a reason to look beyond the anxious housewife, though Laura remains the performance we would send someone to first. Watch Brief Encounter for how quickly Johnson makes a moment of happiness uncomfortable.
Biography
Celia Johnson was an English actress whose career spanned stage, film and television from 1928 until her death. She trained at RADA and began working in repertory theatre before achieving success in West End and Broadway productions.
She appeared in several films directed by David Lean and written by Noël Coward, including In Which We Serve (1942), This Happy Breed (1944) and Brief Encounter (1945), the last of which brought her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. Later screen roles included The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), for which she won a BAFTA Award. Much of her later work was in television, and she received a further BAFTA for the 1973 BBC production Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont. She was appointed CBE in 1958 and DBE in 1981.
