Angela Lansbury

"When they talk about the Golden Age of Hollywood," Geoffrey Rush asked Dame Angela Lansbury in his toast to her at the 2013 Governors Award in which she "at long last" received an Oscar, "aren't they just talking about you?" That's not hyperbole. When one thinks of 20th cinema in the United States, one certainly thinks of iconic figures like Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Paul Newman, Orson Welles, George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, Danny Kaye, Cecil B. DeMille, James Earl Jones, Elizabeth Taylor, and Judy Garland. The common denominator of them all is that they worked with Angela Lansbury, who died today at the age of 96, in her legendary career that started in 1944 when she was just 17 years old.

Playing the flirtatious and rather rude Nancy Oliver, a housemaid of the couple played by Bergman and Charles Boyer, she turned 18 on the set of that first film of hers (the Hollywood remake of Gaslight) and then became one of the few performers to get an Oscar nomination for a debut performance. In the film, Lansbury immediately presented to audiences her remarkable versatility and an ear that worked like a sponge, assisting her in her ability to do a variety of accents, a trait that served her well not only in Gaslight but in a whole host of films from The Long Hot Summer in 1958 to Nanny McPhee in 2005.

Her post-Gaslight features saw here in roles that were the complete opposite of Nancy: playing the kind, older sister of Elizabeth Taylor's character in 1945's National Velvet (which started a life-long friendship between the two) and singing for the first time on screen in 1946's The Picture of Dorian Grey, which earned her a second Oscar nomination. Alas, Dame Angela never did nab a competitive Oscar, even when she was thought to have been a shoe-in for her villainous portrayal as Mrs. Iselin in the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate. (She lost to Patty Duke for her performance in The Miracle Worker.) Awards success surprisingly evaded her through much of her career. Fans of Murder, She Wrote (the hit TV series where she played the sleuth Jessica Fletcher for 12 years) might be surprised to learn that she was nominated for an Emmy every year the show was on air, but she never once won.

However, the theater crowd always gave her the prizes she deserved. The final days of the old Hollywood contract system gave her steady work, like the musical Western The Harvey Girls (a movie which gave her the honor of being the only actor to get a fight scene with Judy Garland, to my knowledge), the Biblical epic Samson and Delilah, and the beloved Danny Kaye comedy The Court Jester, but she remained a bit player before shifting to television and theater. Despite a flop with her first Stephen Sodheim collaboration Anyone Can Whistle in 1964, she became a much bigger national star and gay icon with her performance in the title role of Mame in 1966, earning her first of five Tony Awards. She also won for Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd: The Demon of Barber Street, and Blithe Spirit.

Often, Lansbury was a part of a great ensemble (and she was often the best part), and sometimes, frankly, she was the only good thing about a production, like in the biographical film Till the Clouds Roll By or the Disney musical Bedknobs and Broomsticks, one of the few films in which she played the lead. Despite Bedknobs and Broomsticks being a weak attempt at recreating the magic of Mary Poppins (she's also brilliant as the Balloon Lady in the 2018 sequel Mary Poppins Returns, by the way), Bedknobs and Broomsticks comes across as flat and uninspired, but it's a joy to watch and listen to her sing songs like "Substitutiary Locomotion." 

Murder, She Wrote is another example of her being the best part of something. The plot, rhythm, and style of each of the 264 episodes were largely the same, for better or worse. Sometimes it was difficult to keep up with all the clues, sometimes the murderer's motive made no sense, and sometimes it seemed the writers were bending over backwards to surprise viewers with who the culprit really turned out to be. But in just about every episode, she was fantastic. The show's bookend episodes, for example, in which Jessica would host and narrate an episode that had nothing to do with her and her sleuthing (making her a minor part of the story), serve as reminders at just how much she really carried that show.

It was Murder, She Wrote that most likely served as many Millennials' introduction to Angela Lansbury, primarily for it being a show our grandmothers loved. Actually, in addition to that, I have a very vivid memory of watching her in the 1978 adaptation of Death on the Nile with my grandmother in which Lansbury gets shot in the head as she was about to reveal who the murderer was. (She once joked that she was "a great dier" on screen.) Between these two murder-mystery pieces of pop culture, I recognized even at the age of four or five that Lansbury was in fact the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, which might remain her most beloved performance on the big screen. With her beautiful singing of the film's Oscar-winning title song, she would become a permanent part of history.   

And a permanent part of us, as well, with all the memories we have of her playing such fantastic characters. She was a natural, among the very best of Golden Age of Hollywood. There will never be another actor quite like Angela Lansbury.