Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury is presently headlining a tour of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, the play that won her a fifth Tony in 2009. She plays Madame Arcati, an eccentric medium who conjures up a novelist’s dead wife to the tune of Irving Berlin’s “Always,” much to the comedic exasperation of his (living) second wife. As Lansbury crosses the United States, she leaves in her wake a renewed flurry of interest in her lengthy career. The 89-year-old has stated that this will be her final tour; and while she is not retiring from acting, much of the world will no longer have the privilege of seeing Dame Angela tread the boards live.
As such, it may be time to remember the eternal life and endless youth of pixels and silver halide, where we can always visit Lansbury as she walks us through a masterclass in every archetype a woman can play. For, while Lansbury is perhaps best known to American audiences for playing the warm-but-sharp mystery author Jessica Fletcher, who is inexplicably plagued by murders wherever she goes, she has in her lifetime filled many very different roles. Angela Lansbury is a character actor who has fought hard for breadth in her career and has never been merely a pretty face—though she has played plenty of those.
In her youth, she ran the gamut of seductive roles. Perhaps most famously, she played the actress Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), who is tested and found to be disappointingly mortal out of the spotlight by the cruel Dorian. In Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949), she played the older sister of Delilah, Semadar, the Philistine beauty Samson first desires. In Gaslight (1944), her first film role, she played the disdainful but seductive young cockney maid who furthers the “gaslighting” of Ingrid Bergman.
Then there are her innumerable caring, guiding, mothering roles. In Blue Hawaii (1961), Lansbury played the comic, nagging mother of Elvis Presley, though she was a mere 10 years his senior. She also played the title role in a charming television musical, Mrs. Santa Claus (1996), and provided the voice of the Dowager Empress in the surprisingly tolerable Anastasia (1997). Lansbury is a beloved figure in the Disney cosmos. She is the voice identifiable in an instant to millions of children as Mrs. Potts from Beauty and the Beast (1991) and the stern but kind witch Miss Price from Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). In her Christmas concert with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in 2002, she expounded on this aspect of her career: In these roles, she reassures us that we are “safe and loved, and that good will triumph over evil, and right will prevail.”
Of course, that is not always the message her distinctive voice has given; she has a well-exercised villainous streak as well. In Nanny McPhee (2005), encumbered by a latex proboscis, Lansbury played Aunt Adelaide, a strict and frankly evil archetype of a villain. And in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), in what is surely her most villainous role, she played Mrs. Iselin, the cold and remarkable operator who surrenders her own son to the cause.
For all these parts, and many more, Angela Lansbury was awarded an honorary Academy Award in 2013. This was, presumably, a consolation for the Emmy and Oscar slights of the past—although she seems to fare just fine with the Golden Globes, having won six thus far.
With five Tony awards as well, it’s difficult to say that Angela Lansbury lacks recognition. Indeed, some (me, for example) would say that Lansbury’s work on stage is her strongest. And as every member of every high school drama club is aware, her stage work thankfully lives on in audio recordings, filmed performances, and YouTube clips. While B-roll footage of Gypsy (1973) exists for those devoted enough to scour the Internet, the recording of the cast production is the best way to experience Lansbury’s turn as Rose. To experience her glamorous appearances in Mame, fanatics may choose from the recording that won her a Tony (1966) or grainy footage from the revival two decades later. A 1982 production of Sweeney Todd (in which she originated the role of Mrs. Lovett four years earlier) is preserved in its entirety on DVD.
Angela Lansbury’s life has not been without complexity. Her family came to America from London in 1940 to escape the Blitz. She studied acting in New York, and then moved to Los Angeles, where she got her first film roles with MGM. She has spoken publicly about the death of her father in her childhood, the dissolution of her first marriage, the brightness of her marriage to Peter Shaw, and her children’s (short-lived) drug abuse.
Such episodes, of course, are never as simple in life as they appear on film, and the best actors reveal the complexities that lie one layer below the milestones in our lives. That is what Lansbury brings to her roles. She has said that she has a “God-given gift” for acting—and while this is true, no doubt, experience adds depth to any talent. While more than a few of Lansbury’s roles could be reduced to parody, she plays every character with authenticity and insight. Whether sleuth or saint, vamp or villain, she is unmistakably real.
Lansbury now has the luxury of a professional victory lap: The audience applauds her entrances and even her benign comedic gestures. But Madame Arcati, the oddball medium of Blithe Spirit who could so easily be played as slapstick, is granted a sense of self through Angela Lansbury’s understanding of her character. As she has said, that’s the way she has to play her.
Tara Barnett is a writer in Washington.
