If Gertrude Stein famously deemed Susan B. Anthony “the mother of us all” in her famous opera of that name, perhaps we can agree that Angela Lansbury deserves a share of that title in Anglo-American popular culture.
The beloved actress, who died on Oct. 11 at age 96, never made much of an impression as an ingenue or “It girl.” Instead, Lansbury’s inimitable features — somehow her face was simultaneously cherubic and sharp — and her decisive, no-nonsense, unfussy manner made her casting directors’ preferred choice for mothers or other ladies of a certain age. Notoriously, she was picked to play the mother of her near-contemporary, Laurence Harvey, in John Frankenheimer’s masterly epic of political intrigue, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and she effortlessly embodied a child’s vision of maternal warmth as Mrs. Potts, the teapot matriarch, in Disney’s animated classic, Beauty and the Beast (1991).
Yet this typecasting did not preclude a great variety of roles, tones, and modes for the actress. Yes, Lansbury played an older single woman in both Stephen Sondheim’s dark musical masterpiece Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street and on the immensely appealing CBS mystery series Murder, She Wrote, but in the first, she was capable of participating in murders, and on the second, she proved herself eminently capable of solving them.
Hard as it is to believe, though, Angela Lansbury was once young. Born in London in 1925, she was the daughter of politician Edgar Lansbury and his actress wife, the former Moyna Macgill (who had her daughter’s scrunched-up facial features). Training at what was then the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art preceded her arrival in New York when she was a teenager, a move necessitated by the precariousness of living in London during World War II. In America, aided by the connections of her mother, she eventually found her way to Hollywood. Her first movie set the tone for her career: Hers was not the showiest part but was unquestionably the most memorable. In George Cukor’s superb thriller Gaslight (1944), Lansbury played the Cockney housemaid to troubled marrieds Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, and though she lacked the star power of either, she managed to see what Bergman could not: that Boyer is attempting to persuade his wife that she is unwell when she is, in fact, perfectly fine. “What’s the matter with the mistress?” Lansbury says in a classic line. “She don’t look ill to me.”
Gaslight won Lansbury an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, a prize for which she was nominated twice more, but such plaudits did not translate into conventional star parts. She took a backseat to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944) and to Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls (1946), and by the time she was in her mid-30s, she was playing mother to Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1962); to Tippy Walker, one of the two teen heroines in the delightful World of Henry Orient (1964); and, of course, to Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate. But what a mother! As the imperious, devious Eleanor Shaw Iselin in the latter movie, Lansbury manages to manipulate not only her anti-communist vice presidential aspirant husband but her brainwashed son.
Indeed, Lansbury never shied from edgy parts — among her six Tony Awards was one for her performance in Sweeney Todd — but, in time, she became synonymous with a motherly coziness. She left an impression on multiple generations of children with her kindly performances in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and Beauty and the Beast, and she warmed the hearts of watchers of Sunday night television everywhere as Jessica Fletcher, a widowed novelist who sleuths in her spare time on Murder, She Wrote, which aired from 1984 to 1996 on CBS. Speaking with the Archive of American Television, the actress was rightly proud of reaching what would now be called flyover country. “Ours was always a family-oriented show,” Lansbury said. “Nobody in Hollywood watched it — it was interesting, they never watched it — but back in the rest of the country, it was absolutely numero uno.”
And so Lansbury was to us. Of course, she had a family of her own — she bore two children by her second husband, the late Peter Shaw — but she was welcomed into ours again and again. The academy undid a great injustice by finally giving her an honorary Oscar in 2014. In her 90s, she turned up in Mary Poppins Returns (2018), and her last credit is a testament to her enduring appeal in cozy mysteries: She is said to have a part in the Knives Out sequel, Glass Onion, due in December.
Young actresses frequently bemoan getting “mom parts” before their time, but they should be so lucky to have a career as rich as Angela Lansbury’s.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
