When you think of Angela Lansbury, what role do you first think of when you think of how old you are – with an extraordinary career spanning over 80 years, Lansbury has served generations of filmmakers, stage fans and TV watchers. For an indelible performance.
Perhaps your go-to is Jessica Fletcher, the TV detective she played from 1984-1996. Or maybe you just shudder at the thought of her Broadway appearance as the crazy Mam Dennis of “Ma’am” or Mrs. Lovett, the “Sweeney Todd” imitator. Some fans embraced her as the teapot from the loving mother in the animated “Beauty and the Beast,” while others got a cold sweat remembering her cruel mother in the original “The Manchurian Candidate.”
There are no wrong answers here; 20. for most ofth century and 21 . a good part ofscheduled tribeAngela Lansbury did it all – drama, comedy, music, stage, screen, hot, terrifying – and she did it brilliantly.
Born in London in 1925, she fled the Blitz in 1940 and moved to New York to study acting. By 1942, she signed with MGM in Los Angeles and immediately appeared in three films that remain classics to this day: “Gaslight” and “The Picture of Dorian Grey” (both earned her an Oscar nomination) as well as “National” Velvet.” She was anything but sweet and light during her years in the studio, playing Judy Garland’s beloved Yang in “The Harvey Girls” as well as the unfaithful Queen Anne’s in “The Three Musketeers” (1948). Lie was playing the role of Yin, but she eventually felt disappointed in the roles offered to her and broke her contract in 1952.
The rest of the decade included raising children, doing some stage and TV work, as well as roles in a smattering of films, most notably “The Court Jester,” “The Long Hot Summer” and “The Reluctant Debutante.” But Lansbury’s screen career warmed up anew in the 1960s, as her level of poise and intensity made her a favorite for filmmakers who cast her as characters older than her. In 1962 alone, John Frankenheimer cast Lansbury, then 37, as the mother of 25-year-old Warren Beatty (in “All Fall Down”) and 34-year-old Lawrence Harvey (in “The Manchurian”). Candidate”).
That latter performance earned Lansbury her third and final Academy Award nomination (earning an honorary Oscar in 2014) and remains one of cinema’s all-time awesome moms. Eleanor Iselin is grasping and withholding, brutally condescending and manipulative, big yet brilliant – and that’s before the plot twist. And since Lansbury played older women at a relatively young age, she didn’t have to worry about that difficult transition, juggling multiple screen skills when moving into more mature roles in the notoriously sexist film industry. fell.
The 1960s also marked the beginning of Lansbury’s stage career; She played the lead role in Stephen Sondheim’s 1964’s “Anyone Can Whistle” (it flopped then but is now beloved) and most famously dazzled in the title role of Jerry Herman’s “Ma’am” in 1966, a role that played a major role in made him a huge Broadway star (and a Tony winner) at age 41. She later found success with Sondheim, first appearing in the 1973 revival of “Gypsy” and then as Mrs. Lovett in 1979’s “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street”.
She swung back and forth between stage and cinema, and while 1980’s “The Mirror Cracked” wasn’t a game-changer in the pantheon of Agatha Christie adaptations, Lansbury’s turn as the legendary sleuth Miss Marple was clearly one of the actresses. A-ha moment for who would soon sign on for “Murder, She Wrote,” a casual mystery series created by Peter S. Fisher, Richard Levinson and William Link. (Levinson and Link had previously created “Colombo”.) As Marple-esque novelist Jessica Fletcher, constantly searching for corpses and solving murders in the quaint village of Cabot Cove, Maine, hits on a winning formula. Did that tap into her potential to play sympathetic and shrewd roles while providing plenty of special-guest-star opportunities for fellow veterans of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
The long-running chain would have provided the perfect golden parachute for retirement, but Lansbury never slowed down. In 1999, she joined the cast of the animated “Beauty and the Beast”—singing the title song for good measure—and was still working on film in the early part of the 2000s (“Nanny McPhee,” Popper Penguin”) and “Mary Poppins Returns”), stage (“Deuce” and “Blythe Spirit”) and pulled out of “The Grand Budapest Hotel” because of “Driving Miss”. Due to his commitment to the Australian revival Daisy” opposite James Earl Jones) and television (he earned an Emmy nomination for his 2005 “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” appearance, the 2004 Hallmark Hall of Fame inductee Colm Tobin’s “The Blackwater Lightship” and made her final small screen appearance in the BBC’s 2017 production of “Little Woman”).
Perhaps his “Sweeney Todd” co-star Len Cario summed up Lansbury’s exceptional longevity best when he said in 2012, “Ange is classy and elegant, warm and eclectic, but she is also strict and hopeful.” that everyone around him would give his all. As far as he is concerned, there is no challenge that cannot be met at least partially with a very strong ‘Kappa’ the very strong Yorkshire Gold. But working keeps her spirits up. A healthy diet keeps her beautiful. What keeps her restless are her immense curiosity, her zest for life and her tremendous gift of holding on to joy.”
