Two & Two Make Celia

"St. Joan with a Hockey Stick," hee-hawed London's Daily Express. But the Manchester Guardian disagreed: "She plays the part without deforming it, with a candid, almost childlike delicacy. . . ." And the News Chronicle admired her "exquisitely spiritual rightness."

The actress thus bracketed last week was Celia Johnson, star of such British films as This Happy Breed and Brief Encounter (in which her performance was voted the year's best by New York City's film critics). The occasion: her first stage appearance in five years, as the heroine in the Old Vic production of Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan. The reception was unusual for Celia only in that it contained dissent.

Inspected feature by feature, Actress Johnson is a plain woman. Yet her stage presence, dominated by her huge, sorrow-logged eyes; is delicately compelling. Celia is far less dramatic and complicated than she appears. Says her Old Vic director, John Burrell: "Celia always sticks to simple two and two make four." Noel Coward, one of her fondest fans, complains that in her simple contentment "she has to be batted on the head to act at all."

Producers have been eagerly batting her on the head since 1930, when she scored a personal hit in a flop called Debonair. After her first big London success, The Wind and the Rain (1933), she married a globe-trotting London Timesman, Peter Fleming, and began (as Coward overstates it) to "have children with monotonous regularity" (she has three).

Last year, after her fine performance in Brief Encounter, Hollywood called. "But," says Celia delightedly, "I was in the middle of having a baby."

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