Plot Intro
We’re doing something a bit different here and instead of featuring one film, we’re discussing films from across Lansbury’s extensive career.
The world lost an icon in October 2022. Angela Lansbury is one of my absolute icons - she has been present all through my childhood owing to her roles in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Beauty and the Beast. Later I discovered her early performances in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Grey where she showed her absolute versatility playing nasty and innocent respectively.
But where she truly shone is the stage. Her turn in Gypsy is legendary, and the brief clips you can see on YouTube show her bringing pathos, drama and a mounting sense of wildness as only the second person to play Mama Rose. She also will always be known as Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote.
But what I want to highlight here is the filmed version of her stage performance as Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd. She originated this extraordinary role (performed by other legends like Patti LuPone and Helena Bonham Carter) and the show was filmed and is available on Amazon Prime.
As the murderous Mrs Lovett, Lansbury is peerless. She finds the comedy in the role, creating a physicality that shuffles, jerks and rolls around the stage. She obsesses over the Demon Barber, always close by him, lighting up with happiness when he comes near, and worrying when her own dark secrets may be revealed.
One moment alone proves why she won the Tony for this performance. As she sits, comforting the boy Toby who sings ‘Not While I’m Around’ to her, she slowly realises he is on to her and Todd’s murderous game. She switches between pretending to engage Toby and understanding that she’s going to have to kill him. Mercifully, the producers of this filmed production allow us a sustained close up of Lansbury so we can see the glint and worry in her eyes. It’s captivating.
Elsewhere as she skulks behind Todd, she is obsessive, touching his clothes, always trying to win his heart. It’s large and painted for the stage but with such subtle details that renders it true (and terrifying).
Lansbury was a true actor. She could paint in broad strokes and while she never conquered Hollywood, they did eventually recognise her with an honorary Oscar. I think it’s telling that it’s a filmed production of her stage performance that highlights her mastery - because I think Lansbury was first and foremost a stage actor. She had the ability to draw in a whole theatre to her performance (again: see clips of Gypsy) and play anything from mad and murderous to sweet and innocent to knowing and wised up.
When she died, I told Paul how sad I was that we had finally lost her. Paul replied ‘but what a career she had.’ A Golden Age actor who conquered stage and (small) screen - and a Disney Legend to boot. We won’t see her like again.
Oh, Ange. She’s such a popular figure in our household that we even have a plant named after her (Angela Leafsbury, a fulsome bit of flora even if the name is a rubbish pun). She’s an example not only of an incredible showbiz career, but also of how our perception of time and human generations can be completely eschewed. She was born in 1925, which makes her older than Queen Elizabeth II, Martin Luther King, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Frank, Jackie Onassis and Grace Kelly. She was born in the same year as Paul Newman, Malcolm X, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, Margaret Thatcher, Peter Sellers, Honor Blackman and Richard Burton. She was 10 years older than Elvis. She was 20 years old when Cher was born (although sources disagree over whether Cher was born in 1946 or 1846).
Why am I throwing these Wikipedia-influenced factoids at you? Because I want to show how Ange Lange’s career and life was so lengthy and so consistently active right from when she was 18 and well into her 90s, that she almost transcended time. Even mine and Doug’s generation (and she was in her mid-60s by the time I was born), and perhaps even the generation after us, are so familiar with her work thanks to her collaborations with Disney and the many gifs and memes that Jessica Fletcher cascaded into the zeitgeist, that she remained current and relevant. Many of the cultural icons (whether you love or hate them) listed above have either passed away or their careers ended long before their deaths, it is easy to assume that Ange came long after them. She did not- she was a part of them. It shows just how long and yet, paradoxically, how short an 80-year career can be.
Let’s spend some time dissecting this unbelievable 80-year career. It’s telling that Ange’s (and I call her Ange like I know her) first film role was not the usual bit-part in a lost film, but a major supporting role in popular and influential thriller, Gaslight. So at the age of 18, Ange gets her big break in a successful Hollywood film with already-established-legends Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer and THEN has the nerve to get nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 17th Academy Awards in 1945. Did she fade away and reappear in the mid-70s for Bedknobs and Broomsticks? Hell no she didn’t. The next year, she got Oscar-nominated again for The Picture of Dorian Gray, her second nomination before she was 21.
Surely then her career faded a little? NO! Don’t be so foolish. By the end of the 1940s she had acted with not just Bergman, but Judy Garland, Elizabeth Taylor, Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy, George Sanders, and Gene Kelly. In the early '50s she got her third Oscar nom for The Manchurian Candidate. In the following decades she garnered some spectacular theatre credits such as the original Broadway production of A Taste of Honey with Joan Plowright and Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian for you Star Wars fans), the original production of Mame with Bea Arthur, the original London production of Gypsy and the original production of Sweeney Todd.
Surely after all this she would be tiring and looking to do smaller roles, right? WRONG. It was AFTER all of this that she gained the lead in the murder mystery series Murder She Wrote which lasted 12 years. THEN she played Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast, singing one of Disney’s most immortal love songs. And even after all that she had the audacity to return to theatre in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit TWICE and even make brief appearances in Nanny McPhee, Mary Poppins Returns and in the upcoming Knives Out sequel. On top of that, I have barely had time to recommend her roles in Agatha Christie adaptations Death on the Nile and The Mirror Crack’d, and in the terrible remake of Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes. She even found time to contribute to the Democrat party in the States, the Labour Party in the UK and charities providing support to victims of domestic abuse and HIV (go Ange!)
I think one would struggle to name any other actor or actress who has achieved such consistent success and longevity. So how on earth did she do it? The question is all the harder to answer bearing in mind that she was not conventionally glamorous in the same vein as Bette Davis, Joan Crawford or Grace Kelly, nor did she really have any lead roles until past the age of 50 (and even then her niche was in eccentric or matronly supporting roles). Indeed, Eglantine Price and Jessica Fletcher were probably her only best-know lead roles on screen, with Mame, Rose and Mrs Lovett for the stage. On top of that, she had her ups and downs in her personal life. Her son struggled with drug addiction for a period and her daughter had to be saved from the terrifying Manson family cult.
I think the answer lies in a brief section of her Wikipedia page (yeah, I do my research), which explains that Ange never fully engaged in the glitzy nightlife of Hollywood, even in her youth. She was a homebody who liked housekeeping, but I presume this provided her with the time and the necessary rest periods to put every ounce of her being into the roles she played. And you can see it. Although almost all of her most famous roles are larger-than-life and over-the-top, there’s an energised exactitude to her expressions and movements that hardwork and a real love of performing brings about. Acting is one of the most physically gruelling careers you can have and additional partying and socialising, as fun as it is, potentially leaves one too exhausted to put your all into a performance. But this appears to have never been a problem for Ange, even despite being a chain-smoker up to her 40s.
This is also probably why we (and by “we” I mean, me, Doug, and anyone who watched Bedknobs and Broomsticks on a near-continuous loop during the '90s) adored her so. She never disappointed in her roles, she was driven towards home and career in equal measure, and as a result, she could maintain her well-deserved image of absolute loveliness and magnificence right up until her death at the age of 96.
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