© English Heritage
Dame Celia Johnson, the actress who tearfully waved goodbye to Trevor Howard from a steam swathed railway station in the 1945 film Brief Encounter, has today been honoured with an English Heritage Blue Plaque at the house in London where she was born.
The plaque was unveiled by the actor Sir Tom Courtenay at 46 Richmond Hill, Richmond upon Thames, TW10, where the acclaimed stage and film actress lived until 1924.
It was at this address that the young Celia Johnson (1908 – 1982) first pondered on the possibility of pursuing her interest in acting. While living here she gave her first public performance – at the age of six – as the beggar maid in King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid (1916), to raise funds for soldiers wounded in the war.
Although her early acting experience was limited to appearing in the annual French play at school, she decided to apply to the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (RADA). She later explained, “I thought I’d rather like it. It was the only thing I was good at. And I thought it might be rather wicked.”
On leaving RADA in 1928 she spent a period in repertory theatre before graduating to major West End theatre roles including Elizabeth Bennett in Pride and Prejudice and the second Mrs De Winter in Rebecca – the run of which came to an end when a bomb destroyed the theatre in 1940.
In 1941 she made In Which We Serve with Noël Coward and David Lean, followed in 1943 by This Happy Breed. In September 1944 she was offered the part of Laura Jesson in her most celebrated film, Brief Encounter (1945).
Johnson was in her element playing the heroine, a conventional middle-class housewife who falls in love with a doctor, played by Trevor Howard, after a chance meeting in a station buffet.
After the war she retired for a time into family life before being tempted back into the theatre and going on to make further appearances with the likes of Ralph Richardson and Maggie Smith both on stage and screen.
She died suddenly after suffering a stroke in 1982, just after Angela Huth’s new play The Understanding – which opened in a pre-West End run at the Richmond Theatre – had brought her to work again alongside Ralph Richardson.
Celia Johnson’s daughters, Lucy and Kate, who both attended the unveiling, said: "We are thrilled an English Heritage Blue Plaque has been erected on the house where our mother was born – we are sure she would have been delighted. She loved England and, in a way, portrayed a particular kind of English woman on stage and television and, of course, in her films, notably Brief Encounter."
