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Glynis Johns, remembered by movie audiences as Mrs. Banks from Mary Poppins and by Broadway devotees as the first person to sing Stephen Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” on a national stage, died Thursday of natural causes at an assisted living home in Los Angeles. She was 100.

Her death was announced by her manager and publicist Mitch Clem. “Today’s a sad day for Hollywood,” Clem said in a statement. “She is the last of the last of old Hollywood.”

A Tony winner (Best Actress/Musical) for her performance as Desiree Armfeldt in the original 1973 Broadway cast of the Sondheim-Hugh Wheeler A Little Night Music, Johns both debuted and, due to her widespread acclaim, helped popularize what would become perhaps Sondheim’s most beloved and well-known songs with “Send in the Clowns.”

Born in Pretoria, South Africa, the Welsh Johns made her West End debut in 1931 at age...

On Christmas Eve 1951, NBC aired the very first “Hallmark Hall of Fame” with the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s Christmas opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors.” Rosemary Kuhlman and 12-year-old Chet Allen starred in this Peabody and Christopher Award-winning holiday story of the three Magi who stay with a young physically disabled boy and his widowed mother on their way to Bethlehem to find the Christ child. The presentation was so popular, the cast reprised their roles the following April. The production was done three more times in the 1950s on NBC, but Bill McIver played Amahl because Allen’s voice had changed.

The “Hallmark Hall of Fame,” which would air on NBC, ABC and CBS and is now exclusively on the Hallmark Channel, is the longest-running primetime series in TV history. In the past 70 years it has won over 80 Emmy Awards and dozens of Peabody Awards, Golden Globes,...

For over twenty years, artistic director Dan Wackerman's Peccadillo Theater Company has specialized in mounting handsome productions of infrequently revived Broadway fare of notable pedigree, such as Elmer Rice's Counsellor At Law, Dorothy Parker and Arnaud d'Usseau's Ladies Of The Corridor and, most notably, a sparkling, uproarious revival of John Murray amp Allen Boretz's classic comedy, Room Service.

The 1930s – more films about women, more films about working life. And often the two overlapped. You watch a film made today, it’s brutally clear that the people who made it rarely have to be anywhere In the ‘30s, at the height of the studio system, the entire creative force behind a picture worked 9-5 on the studio lot, just like anyone else. They had a workplace. And while many made a great deal more money than the characters they were depicting, they knew what it was to hold a job. That mindset, that constant awareness of money and office work and routine, bleeds into the pictures of the period.

Take a film like Rafter Romance, which played at TCM Classic Film Festival Friday morning. Ginger Rogers and Norman Foster star as two broke strangers living in the same apartment building (and they say people knew their neighbors back...

New York (Associated Press) — Julie Harris, one of Broadway's most honored performers, whose roles ranged from the flamboyant Sally Bowles in "I Am a Camera" to the reclusive Emily Dickinson in "The Belle of Amherst," died Saturday. She was 87.

Harris died at her West Chatham, Mass., home of congestive heart failure, actress and family friend Francesca James said.

Harris won five Tony Awards for best actress in a play, displaying a virtuosity that enabled her to portray an astonishing gallery of women during a theater career that spanned almost 60 years and included such plays as "The Member of the Wedding" (1950), "The Lark" (1955), "Forty Carats" (1968) and "The Last of Mrs. Lincoln" (1972).

She was honored again with a sixth Tony, a special lifetime achievement award in 2002. Her record is up against Audra McDonald, with five competitive Tonys, and Angela Lansbury with four Tonys in the best actress-musical category and one for best supporting actress in a play.

Hollywood and Broadway star whose family life inspired the musical Gypsy

Those who know the gorgeously gaudy Jule Styne/Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Gypsy (1959) will remember the refrain of "my name is June, what's yours?" addressed to the audience by the curly-haired child performer. "Baby" June was based on June Havoc, who has died aged 97, and the show was inspired by her early days in Us vaudeville with her "monstrous" stage mother and older sister Rose Louise, who became Gypsy Rose Lee, the famous stripper.

"I think Gypsy was one of the most smashing shows I've seen in my life," Havoc once told me. "But very little to do with fact. My mother was not such a monster. Few parents who had a child who, at the age of two, stood on her toes and danced every time she heard music, could resist putting her forward. Particularly if the child was happy doing it.

"I never understood why plays that are political or socially reflective can't be entertainment too," noted David Rothenberg, a publicist, producer, and radio host. "Part of being entertained is being elevated, stimulated. Some of our best theatre is a mirror of what's happening in society that had an enormous effect on people of its time: Death of a Salesman, A Doll's House, Waiting for Lefty, Diary of Anne Frank, and Fortune and Men's Eyes, which changed my life." That last play dealt with sexual brutality in prisons and was so compelling to Rothenberg, he founded the Fortune Society, a group dedicated to advocating for ex-prisoners.These remarks were made as Rothenberg moderated a panel titled Can Theater Inspire Social Change?. The event was sponsored by the Drama Desk, the organization of New York–based theatre critics, editors, and reporters. The lively discussion covered a range of topics and personal experiences.