Versatile actor with a long career on stage and
screen, best known as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote
Michael
Coveney
Tue 11 Oct
2022 23.27 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/oct/11/dame-angela-lansbury-obituary
Although
she was born in London, and retained a classic English poise all her life,
Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, was a Hollywood and Broadway star for
more than seven decades, and one who was completely unclassifiable. On her film
debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight
(1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win
one. She graduated to play Laurence Harvey’s evil, possibly incestuous, mother
– although she was only three years older than Harvey – in John Frankenheimer’s
The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and then a dotty amateur witch in Disney’s
follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
This
versatility, allied to her natural grace, vitality and chastely appealing
features – her eyes were full, blue and unblinking, her face almost perfectly
round, her mouth a cupid’s bow from the studio era – propelled her to stage
stardom in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966) and, in London at the Piccadilly theatre
in 1973, as the show-stopping Mama Rose in Gypsy, by Jule Styne, Stephen
Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.
Lansbury
had been initially reluctant to assume Ethel Merman’s mantle in Gypsy but, like
Merman, she gave the performance of her life, full of steel and tenderness in
equal measure. Her performance was more nuanced and needy than Merman’s; the
critic Robert Cushman described “a slow steady build towards magnificence”.
But she
became best known worldwide for Murder, She Wrote, an American television
series running from 1984 to 1996, with four subsequent TV films. She played the
incisive and level-headed Jessica Fletcher, a retired English teacher, mystery
writer and amateur sleuth in the coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine, a sleepy
location with a criminal body count as delightfully high and unlikely as in
Midsomer Murders.
“It really
was a fluke success,” Lansbury said, “and came at a time when that kind of
family entertainment seemed needed.” She added that, of all the characters she
played, Fletcher was the one most like herself: intuitive and sensitive, a
voice of calm and reason in a troubled time. She gradually assumed ownership of
the CBS series. Peter Shaw, whom she had married in 1949, was joint director of
the production company; her son, Anthony, and stepson, David, were executive
producers, her brother Bruce was supervising producer.
Family was
always of paramount importance to Lansbury. She came from strong, muscular
stock: her father, Edgar Lansbury, was a lumber merchant and one-time member of
the Communist party and mayor of Poplar (his father was George Lansbury, a
reforming leader of the Labour party); her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an Irish
actor who took Angela to the Old Vic theatre in London from an early age. One
of her cousins was Oliver Postgate, the British animator best known for Bagpuss.
She was
educated at South Hampstead high school for girls and trained at the Webber
Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Her father died in 1934, and her mother merged
her family – Angela and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce – with that
of a former British Army colonel in India, Lecki Forbes, under one roof in
Hampstead.
It was not
a happy arrangement.
At the
outbreak of war, Moyna decamped with her children to New York, and Angela
continued her training for two more years at the Feagin school. While her
mother toured Canada in a variety show for the troops, Angela did cabaret turns
in Montreal. When Moyna’s agent sent her to Hollywood for an audition, she
decided to move the children out there with her.
Nothing
much happened at first, so mother and daughter took jobs as sales clerks at Bullocks
Wilshire, the art deco department store in Los Angeles, while continuing to
audition. Angela was still only 17 when she landed the role in Gaslight, and
this set a pattern of playing older than her age. A notable exception was The
Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which she played Sibyl Vane, the chirpy
music-hall singer, a role that brought her second Oscar nomination; through her
co-star, Hurd Hatfield, she met her future husband, Shaw. She had been married
previously, for just nine months, to the actor Richard Cromwell, who was almost
twice her age.
By this
point a Hollywood fixture, Lansbury played Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in
National Velvet (1944), sang Jerome Kern’s How’d You Like to Spoon With Me? in
Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), fooled with Danny Kaye in The Court Jester
(1955), peaked in glory in The Manchurian Candidate, with her third and final
Oscar nomination, and joined another great cast list in The Greatest Story Ever
Told (1965), which David Lean took over as director from George Stevens.
Lansbury
took American citizenship in 1951, and made her Broadway debut opposite Bert
Lahr in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso in 1957, following with Helen in Shelagh
Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in 1960 and, most significantly, Cora Hooper Hoover,
the corrupt mayor in Sondheim and Laurents’s 1964 flop Anyone Can Whistle. The
show, which has since become a concert favourite, closed in a week, but
Lansbury came out of it with flying colours, commended by critics for her
agility and engaging personality; she was even likened to a young Bette Davis.
This led to
her Mame acclaim, and her first Tony award. Lansbury played Auntie Mame, a
free-spirited woman who picks herself off the floor of the stock market crash
to sing Bosom Buddies (Lansbury duetted with Bea Arthur) and who ultimately
recoups her fortunes by marrying a southern aristocrat. She won a second Tony
in Herman’s next show, Dear World (1969), a musical based on Jean Giraudoux’s
The Madwoman of Chaillot, in which she appeared to be dressed in “a wedding
cake made of cobwebs”, according to the critic Walter Kerr.
A belated
London debut followed in 1972, when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at
the Aldwych in Edward Albee’s All Over, playing the mistress of a dying man,
locked in battle with Peggy Ashcroft as his wife. She took Gypsy back to
Broadway in 1974 for a few months, winning her third Tony, then joined the
National theatre at the Old Vic in 1975 to play a fairly youthful, glamorous
Gertrude to Albert Finney’s thickset, plainspoken and powerful Hamlet, directed
by Peter Hall; the production was part of the opening season in the National’s
new home on the South Bank in 1976.
Back on
Broadway, she hit another great milestone in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s
Sweeney Todd (1979), playing the gleefully cannibalistic, pie-making Nellie
Lovett (and winning a fourth Tony) opposite Len Cariou’s demon barber in a dark
and scintillating production by Hal Prince that played on Broadway for a year
before touring the US for another 11 months.
Before
Murder, She Wrote, a series of starry film roles included John Guillermin’s
Death on the Nile (1978) with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Bette Davis, Mia
Farrow and Maggie Smith; Guy Hamilton’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980), in which she
did some sleuthing stretches by playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, with
Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis and, in his penultimate movie, Rock
Hudson; Wilford Leach’s rocked-up The Pirates of Penzance (1983), opposite
Kevin Kline as the Pirate King; and Neil Jordan’s wonderfully weird The Company
of Wolves (1984), in which she played yet another eccentric old granny figure.
She did
voices for two animated movies – Beauty and the Beast (1991, for Disney) and
Anastasia (1997, for 20th Century Fox) – but was not in a feature movie again
until she played Great Aunt Adelaide in Kirk Jones’s Nanny McPhee (2005),
starring and written by Emma Thompson. Subsequently, she was with Jim Carrey in
Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011).
For many
years, Lansbury kept a home in County Cork, Ireland, where she and Shaw would
spend two months each year while maintaining their base in Brentwood, Los
Angeles. She rented an apartment in New York in 2007 to return to Broadway in
Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a specially crafted two-hander for her and Marian
Seldes about former tennis partners reliving past glories while watching a
match at Flushing Meadow, and switching their heads from side to side during
the rallies.
The play
was not a huge hit, but Lansbury was electrifying and was greatly moved by the
affection with which audiences greeted her. She had not been on Broadway since
a possibly ill-advised 1983 revival of Mame.
Regarded by
now as a national treasure, in 2009 she won her fifth Tony as Madame Arcati in
Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, wearing a bright red wig and “with a superfluity
of bad jewellery, the gait of a gazelle and a repertory of poses that bring to
mind Egyptian hieroglyphs”, wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times.
At the end
of the same year in New York, she appeared for six months as Madame Armfeldt in
Trevor Nunn’s Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Sondheim and Wheeler’s A
Little Night Music, winning plaudits for her nostalgic litany of fading
qualities in Liaisons: “Where is style? Where is skill? Where is forethought?
Where’s discretion of the heart? Where’s passion in the art? Where’s craft?”
The Academy
of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences compensated for her lack of an Oscar with
an award for “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” in 2013, and the
following year she was made a dame, and took Madame Arcati to the Gielgud
theatre in London. She was Aunt March in the BBC’s adaptation of Little Women
(2017), and in 2018 she both appeared as a balloon-seller in Mary Poppins
Returns, and joined up with another member of that cast, Dick Van Dyke, as
guardian angels in the Christmas tale Buttons.
Shaw
predeceased her in 2003, and she is survived by Anthony, David, her daughter,
Deirdre, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and her brother Edgar.
Angela Brigid Lansbury, actor, born 16 October
1925; died 11 October 2022
This article was amended on 12 October 2022.
The department store where Angela Lansbury and her mother worked was in Los
Angeles rather than Beverly Hills. The Brentwood area of Los Angeles had been
misnamed as Redwood. The animated movie Anastasia was produced by 20th Century
Fox rather than Disney. Lansbury’s fifth Tony award was for Blithe Spirit
rather than Deuce.
Was Angela Lansbury a grande dame? No, she was warmer
and friendlier than that
Emma
Brockes
I raise my lorgnettes to a national treasure who was
never fully a leading lady in Hollywood or quite a doyenne of the theatre
Thu 13 Oct
2022 11.00 BST
If the
criterion is grandness and grandness alone, then the grandest dame of them all
was someone like Dame Edith Sitwell, the poet, who back in the 1950s, at the
height of her grandness, would intimidate her enemies by regarding them through
a pair of lorgnettes. These days, it’s a term generally reserved for elderly
female actors – hearty, salty, imperious. Americans can do it, of course –
Elaine Stritch, so very great, so very grand – but may struggle to ascend to
the highest reaches of haughtiness achieved by a Dame Maggie Smith or a Dame
Edith Evans. You can be a national treasure, meanwhile, without being a grande
dame (fight me on this, but I’d say Dame Judi falls into this category). Which
brings us to Dame Angela Lansbury.
On Tuesday,
news broke of her death aged 96, triggering an outpouring of affection and
sadness for a cherished figure and one of the last of her generation of
performers. Mind-bogglingly, Lansbury started her career in 1944 after moving
to the US from Britain during the blitz and landing a role, as a teenager,
alongside Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944). That same year, she
appeared in the movie Gaslight, with Joseph Cotten and Ingrid Bergman. She was
around for the heyday of MGM musicals – I remember as a child seeing her on TV
in the 1946 movie The Harvey Girls, alongside Judy Garland, and finding it
impossible to connect her with the character from Murder, She Wrote. By the
time she played the teapot in Beauty and the Beast in 1991 – at a mere 66 – her
longevity alone had already made her beloved.
In the US,
where Lansbury remained after emigrating, she was both national treasure and
grande dame. It feels churlish to say this, but as a musical performer, she was
never quite my cup of tea. I saw her on Broadway in 2009 in a production of A
Little Night Music, co-starring Catherine Zeta-Jones, who did a quite
frightening rendition of Send in the Clowns. Lansbury as Madame Armfeldt was a
terrible old ham, yukking it up for an audience beside itself at the miracle of
her being alive. I was immune to her Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd. Her cameo at
the end of the movie Mary Poppins Returns, meanwhile, was the absolute bloody
kitchen sink in that mess of a movie. On the other hand, I loved her in Murder,
She Wrote.
I’m not
sure what this is. Perhaps something to do with TV being able to absorb greater
levels of camp than musical theatre. This seems counterintuitive, I know;
Broadway is supposed be the ground zero of camp, except it isn’t, not really.
The material in a musical is so florid to begin with, the performances have to
be very tightly controlled to remain credible. There is a fine line in a
musical between thrilling theatricality and everything going Jack Sparrow.
For me, in
her theatre roles, Lansbury had too much self-awareness. There was an archness
to her performances that seemed to wink at the audience and suggest, well, this
business of singing and acting is faintly ridiculous, after all – and of
course, when you play it like that, so it is. As Jessica Fletcher, however, she
convinced me totally. I liked her as the teapot. Given her god love ’er status,
it’s a miracle she dodged being cast as a batty old dame in the endless current
remakes of Poirot, but it’s possible I may have liked her in those.
Who is
left? Dame Julie Andrews (87). Dame Eileen Atkins (88). Dame Joan Plowright
(92). Bassey! I’m putting Dame Shirley (85) on the list, as you must. Anyone
who sings I Who Have Nothing draped head to toe in mink and covered in diamonds
deserves, possibly, the crown of grandest of them all. Perhaps that was my
problem with Lansbury. Never fully a leading lady in Hollywood, or quite a
doyenne of the theatre, she seemed modest, likable, approachable. Not a grande
dame of the first rank, perhaps, but something warmer and friendlier, whose
loss may be more keenly felt.
Emma
Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York
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