There is no getting away from the fact that it is a very good part and one which I should love to play,” wrote my mother, Celia Johnson, to my father, Peter Fleming. “I have found myself already planning how I should play bits and how I should say lines that I can remember from Noël having read it to me...It's about a woman, married and with two children who meets by chance a man in a railway waiting-room and they fall in love. And It's All No Good.” The part was that of Laura Jesson, the film Brief Encounter, and the date September 1944.
Today marks the centenary of the birth of Celia Johnson, remembered now for that role, and a blue plaque will be unveiled by English Heritage on the house in Richmond where she was born.
Celia added about her meeting with Noël Coward to discuss the film: “It was rather fun, my day in London. For one thing I went up by car.” She accepted the part but not without misgivings, for in this fifth year of the war things were very hard. Petrol was rationed (cars were still on blocks), food was rationed, clothes could only be bought with coupons and Celia was living in Oxfordshire with her son, her widowed sister and sister-in-law, and seven more small children, a household that she felt she could not abandon. Parts in the theatre had been out of the question, entailing as they could long runs, but filming was possible with its more limited timetable. She had been in In Which We Serve (1942) and This Happy Breed (1943) which, like Brief Encounter, were made by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame, known as Cineguild. Noël Coward, who wrote the screenplays, called them “my little darlings”.
A little-known actor, Trevor Howard, was cast as Dr Harvey. “He has been invalided out of the army,” Celia told Peter, “and did I tell you the really terrible thing about him is that he is eight years younger than me? Isn't it dreadful? When I first realised it I nearly fainted with shock and horror but now I am getting acclimatised and treat him like a mother”. She and Trevor Howard had great professional respect for each other, but never became that close. Celia was quicker on the uptake; Trevor Howard was rather blunter. An obituary compared her to a cucumber sandwich and a knitted jumper. That was her image. But any form of preparation of food unnerved her and her knitting was littered with dropped stitches.
Brief Encounter was filmed at Carnforth Station, Lancashire, where they could use lights at night without danger of being bombed, and at Denham studios, Buckinghamshire. Celia loved the time at Carnforth. They stayed in a hotel at Windermere where the food was excellent (a huge treat then) and they were taken to the station every night in a Rolls-Royce. “One night we were forced to go in a Packard and there was a good deal of mutterings and complaints and the next night I am happy to say we got the Rolls back. We could hardly be expected to put up with anything less,” she wrote with irony.
Similarly she was amused by the fact that during breaks the cast would repair to a first-class restaurant car while the rest of the crew had to go into third class. “I have played poker with a certain amount of trepidation but have stayed even so far.
“Would you believe it - there are at least 80 people up here to do this stuff. We could easily fight a small war on our own.”
The end of the war came when they were back in the south, filming at Denham, she wrote to Peter on May 8, 1945: “My darling, we have really won the war and I can't believe it...To start with we all got into a state of rising excitement culminating on Monday when rumours were rife and all expected the news of victory from moment to moment. At the studio excitement became intense at lunchtime by the report that all Technicolor cameras had gone up to the Palace and bets were laid and work haphazard on account of having to rush out to listen to the radio between every shot. A sign of the tremendous upheaval was stressed by the unprecedented buying of a bottle of rather nasty white wine by Tony Havelock-Allan at lunch-time on our table.”
“I do hope I'm good in the film - I really do want to be - most dreadfully badly but am dubious about it,” she wrote to Peter at about that time. And she was. She was nominated for an Oscar.
So powerful is the depiction of falling in love and its renunciation in Brief Encounter from the concatenation of talents connected with it that today dated details and the now-hilarious clipped vowels become irrelevant. But the name Celia Johnson has come to epitomise a genteel, very English, middle-class woman, emotions firmly under control.
Was she like that? Well, yes and no. Certainly she was thoroughly English with antecedents in East Anglia and Lancashire, and certainly she could keep a stiff upper lip. Serious and somewhat soulful in the film, in life she was always ready to laugh. She was clumsy and untidy, modest and witty. Running a house was a mystery to her, and cooking terrified her, and she felt inadequate on both these counts throughout her life. “I am not much of a helpmeet,” she said to Peter. She excelled at the Times crossword, loved a game of bridge and had a keen ear for poetry. She lacked social confidence but was game for anything else. She took remarkably little trouble about her appearance - a stab at make-up, the odd perm. Graceful on stage, she was short-sightedly bumbling off, striding forward with round glasses perched on her rather prominent nose, curls from the perm bobbing, casting an amused remark at this and that. For us as children she was fun, maternal in a light-hearted way. She kept theatre and home largely separate, though she was very pleased when my sister Lucy decided to go on the stage. “Get the walk right first,” she advised.
Brief Encounter accounted for just a few months in a distinguished career that spanned 50 years. Living in Richmond, where her father was a GP, she went to St Paul's Girls' School and from there to RADA. Asked at the end of her life by an interviewer about how she came to act, she said: “I thought I'd rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked.” She had obvious talent, and after RADA had leading roles in a string of West End plays right through the 1930s, for all of which she received good reviews, though a verdict of “Old actress spoils play” on an early performance as Juliet always amused her.
Following the hiatus during the war when she made those few films she returned to the stage again, first as St Joan and then through the Fifties in staple West End fare of the time - N.C.Hunter, Terence Rattigan, Willaim Douglas-Home. The doyen of the fifties theatre, Binkie Beaumont, was frequently to be heard on the hall telephone at home beseeching Celia to do this part or that.
But Celia was torn by that eternal dilemma - home and children (my brother Nichol, Lucy and I) or work. She felt that she should stay at home with us, but was undoubtedly more fulfilled when she had her teeth into a good part, or even a not so good part. She liked the mechanics of acting, the intellectual challenge of it, the rehearsals; celebrity, barely known then, meant little to her.
After my father died and we had all left, she had a series of triumphs both on the stage, especially in the early days of the National Theatre when it was at the Old Vic, and on television, a medium that her generation, trained solely for the theatre, were slow to adopt - televised Shakespeare, Play for Today, and much more. A reunion with Trevor Howard in an adaptation of Paul Scott's novel about the end of the Raj, Staying On, was warmly welcomed and poignant.
In 1981 she was made a dame and in 1982 she was touring in a play by Angela Huth with one of her favourite colleagues, Sir Ralph Richardson, before opening in London. To their astonishment they received standing ovations - highly unusual then. Two days before the official opening night, while playing bridge with old friends on her day off, she suffered a stroke and died. Her name was in lights in the West End as it had been for more than 50 years, but this time there would be no performance.
Her great, truly great, contemporaries, Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson - a remarkable generation of actors by any standard - are all now fading from memory, their best performances ephemeral, their names now attached to theatres. Such is the tragedy of theatre. And such is the wonder of film for Celia's star has remained brighter than it might have done entirely because of that doomed love affair filmed on Carnforth station. “We had a very long night two days ago,” she wrote from there in February 1945, “and didn't finish in the station until 7.30, by which time the fish train from Aberdeen had pervaded the place - not really awfully encouraging to Art at that hour of the morning. I was playing a sad little scene with the scent of herrings in the air and milk cans rattling.” Her performance, it turns out, was good enough for a blue plaque. She loved blue plaques and was always curious about them. How thrilled she would be.
Did she realise that she had become a sort of film icon? No, not really. Although Brief Encounter was a success at the time and Celia was nominated for an Oscar, and slowly became a classic occasionally shown here and there in art-house cinemas, it wasn't until the advent of video that it became better known and began to rank in lists of top ten romantic movies. So it was only at the very end of her life that people began to start asking her questions about it. When asked by an American interviewer whether she had any regrets, she said: “I do wish I'd done more Shakespeare, which always gives me my greatest satisfaction.” Anything else? “Well, I'd liked to have leant against the wall in thrillers.”
