Angela Lansbury (1925-2022)
By: Charles Isherwood (WSJ)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Angela Lansbury, who died Oct. 11 at age 96, leaves behind a legacy that spans virtually all popular media. She is undoubtedly best known to most Americans as the sharp-witted Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer who stumbled upon more corpses than Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple combined during the 12-year run of "Murder, She Wrote."
Ms. Lansbury, who was born in England but mostly worked in America, also had a film career of note. She made her debut in a small role as a surly cockney maid in the 1944 classic "Gaslight"—surely the only movie to inspire a verb many a decade after its debut. Her most famous film role was another steely character, the manipulative mother in the Cold War thriller "The Manchurian Candidate." Across several decades, many genres and more than 50 movies, Ms. Lansbury never seemed to be not working, even as—at least until the advent of "Murder, She Wrote"—popular stardom, and the sympathetic movie roles that might have brought it about, eluded her. ("I was desperate," she told a biographer of her appearance as Elvis Presley's mother in "Blue Hawaii.")
But there was one realm in which she became both a cherished figure and an authentic (pre-Jessica) star: on the Broadway stage. Despite performing in just over a dozen shows, she won five Tony Awards, in addition to a lifetime achievement award.
She made her debut in 1957 in a Feydeau farce, and three years later played the promiscuous mother of a daughter who falls in love with a black man—a daring subject even in 1960—in “A Taste of Honey.”
But Ms. Lansbury began to shine brightest when she earned substantial roles in musicals that offered prime showcases for her bountiful talents. The first was the quick flop “Anyone Can Whistle,” a whimsical satire in which Ms. Lansbury played the corrupt mayor of a small town who attempts to manufacture a miracle (never mind). It was notable only for its score by Stephen Sondheim, then just beginning to find his footing as both composer and lyricist.
Two years later, she finally landed the part that would cement her place in musical-theater history, the title role in the Jerry Herman musical “Mame.” Playing—for once, it seemed—a character not just irrepressible but irresistible, the madcap aunt who raises her nephew to always look cockeyed at life, Ms. Lansbury gave a performance that has remained definitive.
She did not possess a voice of any great beauty, to be sure, but she had power, firm pitch and precise phrasing and diction. Also a flair for comedy that had rarely been showcased before “Mame.” A highlight was the savagely funny duet “Bosom Buddies,” performed with Bea Arthur, as Mame’s ever-sozzled actress friend Vera Charles, in which they trade barbed insults mockingly offered as affectionate bouquets. They reunited to perform the song when Ms. Lansbury hosted the Tony Awards in 1988; you can savor its delights on YouTube.
But Ms. Lansbury’s stage career reached its apex when she bit into the juicy role of Mrs. Lovett, the meat-pie-making partner of the murderous barber in “Sweeney Todd,” which features perhaps Sondheim’s greatest score. Many actresses have played the role since, some memorably, but all owe a debt to Ms. Lansbury’s unforgettable delineation of the character, one of the most accomplished—not to mention distinctive—musical-theater performances of the 20th century.
What Ms. Lansbury managed to do seems almost impossible: to make not just compelling but sympathetic a woman who knowingly assists in serial murder, and then has the ghoulish inspiration to improve the quality of her wares by, ahem, repurposing the corpses. The production has been preserved on video, and in it you can see just how masterfully Ms. Lansbury burnishes the comic aspects of the role while also making this repellent character freakishly touching. The performance is like a Hogarth engraving sprung to antic, frantic life.
In the decades since its 1979 debut, the combination of bloodlust and humor that marked “Sweeney Todd” has become something of a pop-culture staple, if not a cliché; then, it was radical. Ms. Lansbury, with her long experience playing villainous or amoral characters, arguably created in Mrs. Lovett one of the templates for the genre.
And when she became a beloved household name as Jessica Fletcher, I fancifully imagine that her years of portraying victimizers more than victims may have played a role in the way the character so shrewdly intuited the motives, and manners, of all those murderers.
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Her passing marks the end of an era in entertainment.