Glynis Johns outlived all 4 of her husbands before death aged 100 as turbulent love life saw her admit ‘I tread softly’
GLYNIS Johns, best known for her role as Mrs Banks in the 1964 film Mary Poppins, died at the age of 100.
The actress starred in the classic movie where she played Winifred Banks, the suffragette mother of the children in need of a nanny.
She was married four times and had one son, the late actor Gareth Forwood.
The Tony Award-winner outlived all of her ex-husbands, as well as her only child.
She met her first husband Anthony Forwood while rehearsing for Quiet Wedding (1941), in which she played the bridesmaid Miranda Bute.
The couple married in 1942 and had their only child, Gareth, in 1945, but divorced three years later due to “adultery”.
Johns then started dating Antony Darnborough after the pair worked on the 1951 anthology film Encore together.
Darnborough proposed to her at the Sunningdale Golf Club in Berkshire, however the wedding was called off.
She then married David Foster, a Royal Navy officer and businessman, in 1952 in Manhattan, New York.
They divorced in 1956.
Her third husband, Cecil Henderson, was a businessman who she married in 1960.
The duo divorced just two years later after Henderson claimed she had an affair.
Johns’s fourth and final husband was the writer and United States Air Force captain Elliott Arnold.
They married in 1964 in Los Angeles and divorced in 1973.
Asked about a fifth marriage in a 1973 interview with Robert Berkvist, Johns said: “I’d tread very softly in that area. Very softly.
“I certainly wouldn’t rush into anything again, and I’d have to have an awful lot in common with anyone I’d consider marrying next time.”
Her closest surviving relative is her only grandchild Thomas Forwood, 48, a French writer and film director who grew up with her.
“My grandmother had the most incredible career over many decades and produced this vast body of work,” he told the Daily Express.
“There’s so much of it. I’ve only seen a fraction of it myself. But I’m immensely proud of her.
“It was strange growing up and saying to my friends, ‘Oh my grandma was in Batman‘. Or seeing her in Mary Poppins.”