Fond Farewell: Acting, She Did

The world was forced to say goodbye to a true marvel of the acting profession on October 11th, 2022. Just five days shy of her 97th birthday, Dame Angela Lansbury died in her sleep, leaving behind nearly 80 years worth of performances on screen! Remarkable right out of the gate, she navigated a career that took her to the heights of movie notability, triumphs of the stage and remarkable and lasting success on television. Not that there weren't disappointments along the way, but she always managed to turn lemons into lemonade, resiliently bouncing back into view with a new, successful venture. We've written about several of her projects here, but today we recap some of the highlights of her enduring, sometimes amazing career. 

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in Regents Park London, England on October 16, 1925 to a timber merchant (and member of the Communist party) and an Irish actress (Moyna Macgill.) Following her father's death of stomach cancer at 48 and later the threat of the London blitz of WWII, she, her younger twin brothers and her mother moved to Canada. Eventually, the foursome settled in Hollywood where Macgill sought work as an actress.

While Macgill did win some uncredited bit parts, it was her 17 year-old daughter who wound up landing in clover during this period. Having already lied about her age in order to perform in a nightclub act, the young girl was suggested for a film role by her mother who was hobnobbing with a screenwriter at a party. Lansbury, who'd been supporting her family on a $28/week department store salary was about to take Tinseltown by storm.

Lansbury was cast as a conniving Cockney maid in Gaslight (1944), a thriller starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman. Requiring a social worker as chaperone on the set due to her age, she rose to the occasion of this inaugural film role splendidly and wound up receiving an Oscar nomination for her first appearance on celluloid! Though the award went to Ethel Barrymore for None But the Lonely Heart, Lansbury secured a contract at MGM, the studio of its time and was now bringing home $500/week!

Her next assignment was as Elizabeth Taylor's older sister in National Velvet (1944), a substantial crowd-pleaser. She was half a dozen years older than the brunette child star.

For her third film, she played a music hall singer who has the bad fortune to fall in love with Hurd Hatfield in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945.) While the movie was not a box office winner, she was again Oscar nominated, this time losing to Anne Revere, who'd played her mother in National Velvet.

Now approaching 20, Lansbury married for the first time to 1930s actor Richard Cromwell (whose films included The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, 1935, and Jezebel, 1938, among others.) His acting career was basically over by 1943 thanks to service in the Coast Guard during WWII. He'd begun a pottery and ceramics business. The marriage, however, was doomed to failure from the start.

Cromwell, sixteen years older than Lansbury, was secretly gay and was trying to overcome it through this marital union. However, the experiment proved futile and caused no small degree of confusion and heartache for his young wife. Within a year, she'd filed for divorce, though the two were eventually able to maintain a loyal friendship after all. Cromwell made one picture in 1948 and was attempting a comeback in 1960 when he was felled by liver cancer at age 50.

Career-wise, Lansbury continued chugging along. Not content to have mistreated Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight, she now looked down her nose at Judy Garland in 1946's The Harvey Girls.

She worked with stars like William Powell in The Hoodlum Saint (1946) and George Sanders in The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947) or, as seen here, Deborah Kerr and Walter Pidgeon in If Winter Comes (1947.) Yet, somehow, she'd gone from teenager to the other woman/third wheel with barely a stab at playing the heroines. In other words, she was emerging as a character actress versus a traditional leading lady.

Movies like State of the Union (1948), with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy only underlined this fact, though she sure had some interesting hair in it.

The 1948 edition of The Three Musketeers employed an all-star cast and she was cast as Queen Anne.

However, what she'd really wanted was to sink her teeth into the meaty role of Milady de Winter. I don't doubt she could have acted the part with a bit more venom, but it would be hard to imagine a more physically stunning Milady than Lana Turner in her first color movie.

MGM had begun loaning her to other studios, such as to Paramount for Samson and Delilah (1949) in which she played Delilah's (Hedy Lamarr) sister.

Personally, things were on an up-swing. Not long after her 1946 divorce, Lansbury met handsome British actor-turned-movie-exec Peter Shaw and the two were married in 1949. They would remain wed, having two children together, until his death in 2003.

She was back to playing a trouble-making housekeeper in Kind Lady (1951), this time tormenting Ethel Barrymore (who'd beat her for that first Oscar!)

She played a mysterious lady with the fun name of Valeska Chauvel in 1953's Remains to Be Seen, a murder mystery with the unlikely duo (for this genre) of Van Johnson and June Allyson. It would be their last of six movie pairings and would also signal the end of both Allyson and Lansbury's contracts at MGM.

Her next film didn't come until 1955's A Life at Stake, in which she was a seductive temptress to Keith Andes. By this time, she and Peter had had a son and a daughter. Lansbury had been making appearances on television in-between having her children.

A Lawless Street (1955) had her playing the love interest of Randolph Scott, who was more than 25 years her senior.

In The Court Jester (1955), a colorful Danny Kaye romp, she was gussied up as a princess.

Many TV appearances and the occasional movie followed. In 1958, she played the mistress of Orson Welles in The Long, Hot Summer. There was also a supporting part in The Reluctant Debutante.

Often cast as glamorous women, she popped up alongside Sophia Loren in 1960's A Breath of Scandal. This same year she made an impression in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs, playing a character who didn't appear in the source play, but who boosted the film considerably.

What Lansbury had long battled (being thought of as older than she truly was) came to vivid realization when she portrayed the mother of Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii (1960.) She was less than ten years older than the hot rock & roll star.

Likewise, she was twelve years older than Warren Beatty when she played his mother in All Fall Down (1962), opposite Karl Malden. At 38, she was being cast as sometimes matronly mothers.

The lunacy of this casting reached its zenith with 1962's political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, in which she played the mother of Laurence Harvey, who was only three years younger than she! However, the movie was so effectively done and her performance was so convincing that she wound up with another Oscar nomination! This time she would see the award go to Patty Duke for The Miracle Worker.

1963 brought a shrewy role as Peter Finch's unhappy wife in In the Cool of the Day, which starred Jane Fonda.

She looked marvelous in The World of Henry Orient (1964), a Peter Sellers movie in which her husband was played by Tom Bosley. The two would later reunite for 19 installments of Murder, She Wrote.

1965 brought The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders, the title role being filled by Kim Novak.

And there was Harlow, with Lansbury playing the mother of Carroll Baker (essaying the part of doomed screen goddess Jean Harlow.)

Lansbury was noted for her portrayal of the mother whose religious beliefs led to the premature demise of her child, but the writing was on the wall. Lansbury could either continue to support all the new, younger stars on screen or...

...she could reinvent herself on stage. Now 41, she surprised everyone by seeking and winning the title role of Broadway's Mame. With ten song and dance numbers and twenty costume changes, she took The Great White Way by storm and dazzled both audiences and critics with her zestful performances. (This was following a prior, but brief, attempt at Broadway success with Anyone Can Whistle in 1964.) She won a Tony for Mame and another for the later Dear World.

In 1970, Something for Everyone was released (which you may read all about right here.) However, some big changes were coming for Lansbury and her family. Her husband had to endure a hip replacement, her son had slipped into a heroin-induced coma, her daughter had become acquainted with the Manson family (!) and the family home in Malibu was destroyed by fire. With this, they all picked up and moved to Ireland.

She starred in the 1971 Disney musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which featured songs by the same duo (The Sherman Brothers) who'd done Mary Poppins (1964.)

Though the movie, which featured a mix of live action and animation among its many effects, was hacked up a couple of times prior to its release, it nonetheless emerged as a childhood favorite for many. A 1996 restoration sought to replace much of which had been rendered from its original run time. It would be seven years before moviegoers saw Lansbury on the big screen again. In 1974, she went to Broadway with Gypsy, earning a third Tony, though it could only soften the blow so much after having lost the movie role of Mame to Lucille Ball that same year. The film was a notorious flop.

1978 saw Lansbury return to the cinema as part of the all-star ensemble of Death on the Nile. In it, she played one of many suspects, a dotty, tippling romance novelist. The star Peter Ustinov had once been the husband of her older half-sister Isolde from 1940-1950.

That same year, she filled on on Broadway in The King and I for Constance Towers, who was taking a one-month break. Michael Kermoyan was portraying the King at this time.

There was a 1979 retelling of Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes, but whether it was "masterful" or not is a subject of debate...

More rewarding was another turn on Broadway, this time as the pop-eyed Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. This venture garnered Ms. Lansbury a fourth Tony! She played the role for 14 months, later touring with it for 10 more.

The next time movie audiences saw her, it was like this! She was playing Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980.) In it, old pal Elizabeth Taylor plays a famous, glamorous actress while Lansbury was dowdied-up like this.

A film of Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta The Pirates of Penzance (1983) had Lansbury on screen with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt. Patricia Routledge (later of Keeping Up Appearances) had played the part on Broadway, but this time it was Lansbury who ended up in a film versus the prior stage performer.

Lansbury performed in several TV miniseries such as Little Gloria... Happy at Last, Lace and The First Olympics, Athens 1896 before beginning what would become her signature role in 1984. That year marked the debut of detective novelist Jessica Fletcher, who solved real-life murders each week on Murder, She Wrote. (Both Jean Stapleton and Doris Day had declined the role.)

Murder, She Wrote was a runaway success, airing from 1984 to 1996 (and with several TV-movies after that until 2003!) Practically everyone under the sun took his or her turn playing either a murder victim or a suspect as Lansbury got to the bottom of each slaying. Eventually, her husband, her brother, her stepson and her son became producers on the series, making it a family experience.  Lansbury was Emmy-nominated twelve times for the show, but was never granted the award.

Understandably, Lansbury's other output dwindled to a large degree as she submitted to the relentless workload of her series, though she did memorably portray Mrs. Potts in 1991's Beauty and the Beast and likewise contributed to Anastasia (1997) along with occasional TV-movies. She was made a Dame Commander in 1994. She also returned to the stage after the end of Murder. When her beloved husband of 54 years died in 2003 of heart failure at age 84, that was the end of Jessica Fletcher.

It wasn't the end of Lansbury, though. She continued to perform, including this appearance in the 2005 film Nanny McPhee. Then there was Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) and a Little Women miniseries. She even returned to Broadway, earning a fifth Tony for Blithe Spirit and coming back again opposite Catherine Zeta-Jones in A Little Night Music. A final trip to The Great White Way came when she performed in The Importance of Being Earnest in 2019.

When Mary Poppins Returns was released in 2018, there she was in a cameo as a balloon lady.

That same year, she and Dick Van Dyke, the original male lead of Poppins, appeared together in Buttons, A New Musical Film. While Lansbury had immortalized amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, Van Dyke had enjoyed his own late-career success in a similar vein on Diagnosis Murder.

Lansbury had long wanted to earn an Oscar for her work in the movies, but she could not seem to land a role that would ensure this. (Ironically, she turned down the role of Nurse Rached in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, 1975, which netted an Oscar for Louise Fletcher.) Her Honorary Oscar in 2014, however, was certainly one well-earned. Even prickly film critic Pauline Kael referred to her as a "picture redeemer" due to the unvarying quality of her work in films of varying quality. Her final work on film is a cameo as herself in, appropriately enough, an upcoming murder mystery, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022.)

Perhaps Miss Lansbury now has a perfect view of the moon at all times.

There's no question that she was a bright star to millions of fans for her work on stage and screen. Rest in peace Dame Angela.