Glynis Johns, the Tony Award-winning screen and stage star who played the mother opposite Julie Andrews in “Mary Poppins” and introduced the world to the bittersweet standard-to-be “Send in the Clowns” by Stephen Sondheim, has died at 100 years old.

Her manager, Mitch Clem, said she died of natural causes at an assisted living home in Los Angeles. He said, “Today’s a sad day for Hollywood. She is the last of the last of old Hollywood.” Johns was known to be a perfectionist in her profession: precise, analytical and opinionated. The roles she took had to be multi-faceted. Anything less was giving less than her all. In 1990, she told The Associated Press, “As far as I’m concerned, I’m not interested in playing the role on only one level. The whole point of first-class acting is to make a reality of it. To be real. And I have to make sense of it in my own mind in order to be real.”

Her greatest triumph was playing Desiree Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” for which she won a Tony in 1973. Sondheim wrote the show’s hit song “Send in the Clowns” for her distinctive husky voice, but she lost the part in the 1977 movie version to Elizabeth Taylor. “I’ve had other songs written for me, but nothing like that,” Johns told the AP in 1990. “It’s the greatest gift I’ve ever been given in the theater.” Johns was the fourth generation of an English theatrical family. Her father, Mervyn Johns, had a significant career as a character actor, and her mother was a pianist. She was born in Pretoria, South Africa, as her parents were visiting the area on tour at the time of her birth.

At 12, she was a dancer and at 14, Johns was an actor in London’s West End. Her breakout role was as the romantic mermaid in the title of the 1948 hit comedy “Miranda.” Other highlights from her career include playing the mother in “Mary Poppins,” the film that introduced Julie Andrews and where she sang “Sister Suffragette.” Johns also starred in the 1989 Broadway revival of “The Circle,” W. Somerset Maugham’s romantic comedy about marriage, love, and fidelity, opposite Stewart Granger and Rex Harrison.

Johns also played Desiree’s mother in several “A Little Night Music” revivals. From 1988-89, she portrayed a senior citizen living in an Arizona retirement community (and the wife of onetime Mr. Ed star Alan Young) in the CBS sitcom “Coming of Age.” More recently, she stood out as a vibrant grandmother in Denis Leary’s “The Ref” and had similar roles in “While You Were Sleeping” and “Superstar.” Married four times, Johns had one son, the late actor Gareth Forwood, during her marriage to Anthony Forwood. She has no survivors, Clem said.

When asked by KABC-TV entertainment reporter George Pennacchio in October what it was like to turn 100, she replied: “It doesn’t make any difference to me. I’ve looked good at every age.”