Costumes, She Wore

This is a frivolous, random and rather brief post that has hardly any point to it, but you may find some of it interesting. I have to preface it by saying that most of the content didn't stem from my own imagination. It came to me after reading a post at one of my own favorite blogs, Dreams Are What Le Cinema Is For. One of the movies profiled there not too long ago was The World of Henry Orient (1964), a comedy featuring Peter Sellers that I had long avoided until reading about it there (and then seeing it several weeks later on one of my hi-def movie channels.)

I thought the film was captivating, gently amusing and tenderly touching, much to my surprise, but one thing that definitely stood out for me was the appearance and performance of Miss Angela Lansbury. She plays a wealthy, snooty, dissatisfied wife and mother who tries to have her cake and eat it, too, but risks winding up with just an empty plate.

Lansbury got an early start in the movies, playing a tarty housemaid in 1944's Gaslight at the age of nineteen and copping an Oscar nomination for her very first cinematic performance! (Ethel Barrymore took the statuette home for None But the Lonely Heart.) Within a year, she'd been nominated again for The Picture of Dorian Gray (this time losing to Anne Revere of National Velvet, a film which also featured Lansbury.) With apologies to the amazing Miss Angela, I always thought that she had highly unusual looks, sort of like a very beautiful sculpture that had somehow been allowed to melt a bit, with her large, but slighty droopy, eyes and a mouth with a curious down-turned quality.

"Cuz I'm 50 and I can kick!"

Though a veteran of many movies (often playing mothers of performers not all that much younger than she - and in many cases outliving those people by decades in real life!), Lansbury's most tremendous successes came on the Broadway stage from the mid-1950s on. She scooped up five Tonys along the way for shows such as Mame, Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Blithe Spirit. She also continued to make a mark in movies, gleaning another Oscar nom for her chilling work in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), losing to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker.

In Mame mode.

At the time of Henry Orient, Lansbury was coming off her Candidate triumph and was busily accepting colorful supporting roles in movies like In the Cool of the Day (1963), as a neurotic, scarred wife of an adulterous husband, and Dear Heart (1964), as a woman in danger of losing her fiance to a plain postmistress. Though her role in Orient couldn't be any further from that of the free-wheeling, fanciful and fun-loving Mame, the way she looks in the movie sometimes gives us an idea of what she might have looked like had she been permitted to star in the film Mame (1974), which was instead played by Lucille Ball. All the pics beginning below are from Orient, with Mame-ish quotes sprinkled in at times.

"Life's a banquet and most poor suckers are starving to death!"

"Missy Dennis, stockbroker want to say hello before he jump out of window."

"Light the candles, get the ice out, roll the rug up... It's today!"

Look at this sensational dress and Angie's fab up-do.

She's even sporting some hefty cleavage as she introduces down-to earth Phyllis Thaxter and Bibi Osterwald to her other guests.

Her married character has a little side thing going with pianist Peter Duchin.

"You're my best girl..." Duchin was the son of celebrated pianist-bandleader Eddy Duchin and became a successful tinkler of the ivories in his own right, with positions at top hotels and performances at The White House.

"Oh, Patrick, your Auntie Mame's hung..."

Lansbury's husband in the film was played by Tom Bosley, later of Happy Days.

Of course, Bosley also had a recurring part on a certain little television show of Lansbury's called Murder, She Wrote!

"Would I make the same mistakes, if he walked into my life today...?" I loooovvve this fur coat and hat ensemble.

There was only about a half-inch height differential between Peter Sellers and Lansbury.

Check out those luminous eyes, capable of everything from immense joyfulness to steely evil.

Red is an awesome color on Lansbury and I love her hair this way, too.

"Haul out the holly..." You know, just once I want to descend a staircase while my voluminous gown trails behind me.

Lansbury was only thirty-nine at this point and still had well over fifty years of career left to go! She's still at it now, having a cameo and a song at the end of Mary Poppins Returns (2018.)

As mentioned earlier, Lansbury and Bosley (who are both excellent in Henry Orient) play a married couple with palpable strain between them.

Thirty years later they were reunited on Murder, She Wrote with Lansbury as a resourceful and dogged amatuer sleuth and Bosley as the sheriff in her hometown of Cabot Cove.

It's fascinating to watch them face various domestic issues as man and wife...

...when you're used to seeing them pair up to solve crimes in their oceanside community.

Though she was cleanly casual and occasionally dressed even nicer, Jessica Fletcher was generally an unglamorous type. In one of those things that one hears once and can never forget, I recall her mentioning in interviews that Lansbury always cut her own hair! (A relative of mine at that time snarkily said, "Well, it looks like it!")

But when the occasion called for it, she could always still ratchet up the glitz as in this glorious appearance at the Tony Awards.

Angela Lansbury wanted very much to land that one meaty film role that would win her an Oscar and that didn't happen, but thank God in 2014 she was presented with an Honorary Oscar for her considerable body of work. I encourage you to check out this recent interview with her (in which the ninety-two year-old legend is still perfectly charming, lucid and able to walk around on her own steam.) Someone ought to cast her in something with Betty White!