Glynis Johns, best known for playing Jane and Michael Banks’ suffragette mother Winifred in “Mary Poppins,” has died at the age of 100, according to The Washington Post.
A Tony winner for her work on Stephen Sondheim’s “A Little Night Music,” Johns had her role as Mrs. Banks expanded by Walt Disney beyond how the character was portrayed in P.L. Travers’ “Mary Poppins” novels.
To that end, Mrs. Banks was rewritten as a suffragette whose commitment to the push to grant women the right to vote left her children in need of a nanny like Mary Poppins, and Johns got her own song with the Sherman Brothers’ number “Sister Suffragette.”