Oscar Profile #33: Angela Lansbury

Born October 16, 1925, the daughter of actress Moyna MacGill and British Communist Party member, Edgar Lansbury, and grand-daughter of 1930s Labor Party leader, George Lansbury, aspiring actress Angela Lansbury was greatly influenced by the careers of Hollywood stars Deana Durbin and Irene Dunne, as well as her own mother. After her father’s death, her mother became involved with a tyrannical retired Scottish Army colonel who ruled the family with an iron fist. Under cover of night, the teenage Angela, her mother and twin brothers Edgar and Bruce, escaped his home and were evacuated to Montreal on the last boatload to leave England during the blitz. From there they went to New York and eventually to Hollywood where she worked in a department store while her mother became part of the British émigré establishment. It was through her mother that she met the casting director of The Picture of Dorian Gray who thought she would be perfect for the part of Dorian’s discarded first lover. First, though, he was also casting Gaslight and thought she could handle the part of the surly maid in that film as well.

Cast in Gaslight in support of Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, Lansbury, who was all of 17 at the time, more than held her own against two of the screen’s biggest stars, and along with them, was nominated for an Oscar for her performance. Only Bergman won. She next appeared as Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in National Velvet for which Anne Revere won an Oscar as their mother. The Picture of Dorian Gray was her third film and the one that established her as one of the most versatile of young actresses. It earned her a second Oscar nomination.

It was at this time that she met and married former matinee idol Richard Cromwell, who she didn’t know was gay until legend has it she found him in bed with another man. Though the two remained friends until his death in 1960, the marriage was over in less than a year and the suddenly older, wiser Lansbury threw herself into her work, playing older, wiser characters such as the saloon singer in The Harvey Girls and the newspaper heiress who tries to steal Spencer Tracy from Katharine Hepburn in State of the Union.

By 1949, the twenty-three year-old actress with “mature features” was not only playing older women without stage makeup to make her appear older, she was playing the older sister of Hedy Lamarr in Samson and Delilah. Lamarr was in actuality seven years older than Lansbury.

That same year she married minor actor Peter Shaw, with whom she had a long and happy marriage until his death in 2003 at the age of 84.

She continued to play strong character roles, with an occasional lead in a B film, through the 1950s and early 1960s, most notably as Orson Welles’ mistress in The Long, Hot Summer and Robert Preston’s mistress in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs. Then she moved into playing the mothers of actors not much younger than herself, most notably Elvis Presley’s mother in Blue Hawaii; Warren Beatty and Brandon de Wilde’s mother in All Fall Down and unforgettably, Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate, for which she won her third and last Oscar nomination to date. It was when Frank Sinatra, who was ten years older, wanted her to play his mother in Come Blow Your Horn that she balked and turned her attention to her first love, the stage.

She won good notices for A Taste of Honey in which she replaced Dora Bryan on Broadway and for Stephen Sondheim’s flop musical, Anyone Can Whistle, but it was her next show, Jerry Herman’s Mame that changed her image and made a legend. She won a Tony and a Grammy and followed with more legendary stage performances in Dear World for which she won her second Tony; Gypsy, first in London, then on Broadway, for which she won her third Tony and Sweeney Todd for which she won her fourth Tony and second Grammy.

In the course of the fourteen year period from Mame to Sweeney Todd she also found time to make some of her most interesting films. She had her first major starring role in the 1970 black comedy Something for Everyone and established herself as a Disney heroine of note in 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

In 1978 she was part of the ensemble of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which starred Peter Ustinov whose first wife had been Lansbury’s half-sister.

Her attempt at playing Christie’s Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d was not successful, but it whet her appetite for playing non-professional crime-solvers which she did better than anyone in the legendary TV series, Murder, She Wrote, for which she was nominated for an Emmy every year during the show’s twelve season run from 1984-1997. She was nominated for an Emmy on four other occasions, but has never won.

She took time off from her busy TV schedule to voice Mrs. Potts and sing the Oscar winning title song in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast in 1991 and provided additional voice work for other films, most notably the 1997 musical version of Anastasia.

Back on Broadway, she won a fifth Tony for the revival of Blithe Spirit and received her sixth Tony nomination for last year’s revival of A Little Night Music. It was the only time she was nominated for the theater’s highest honor without winning. She is tied for the most wins with Julie Harris.

The tireless 85 year-old legend recently played a guest-starring role in the season two opener of Britain’s Downton Abbey opposite Maggie Smith and has one film in post-production and another in pre-production.

ESSENTIAL FILMS

THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY (1945), directed by Albert Lewin

In the first film she was cast in, but the third she actually got to make, Lansbury plays Sybil Vane, the discarded first love of Oscar Wilde’s outwardly beautiful but inwardly ugly title character. It’s a brief, but heartbreakingly beautiful performance for which she received her second Oscar nomination at the age of twenty. She reprised her lovely song, “Good-bye, Little Yellow Bird” on Murder, She Wrote many years later. Dorian himself, Hurt Hatfield, was one of the many guest stars she personally invited to play a character in the long-running TV series.

STATE OF THE UNION (1948), directed by Frank Capra

She was only twenty-three when she played the worldly wise newspaper heiress and political kingmaker who attempts to take Spencer Tracy away from his loyal wife, played by Katharine Hepburn. Although Hepburn has our sympathy and the film’s best speech in a role she took over from an ailing Claudette Colbert, it’s Lansbury who has the stronger role in the second of the two films Capra made for his independent Liberty Films before it went bankrupt. The first had been It’s a Wonderful Life.

THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE (1962), directed by John Frankenheimer

Lansbury had her most challenging and memorable screen role as the mother of a Korean War POW who is brainwashed into becoming an assassin for the Communists. Although only three years older than Laurence Harvey who played her son and ten years younger than Frank Sinatra who played Harvey’s contemporary, Lansbury once again without stage makeup convinces us as she always did that she was the character she was playing, this time around a cold, calculating, manipulative bitch. It’s both one of the great screen villains and one of the greatest performances by a character actress ever committed to film.

BEDKNOBS AND BROOMSTICKS (1971), directed by Robert Stevenson

For her starring role in this Disney classic they got her the director (Stevenson) and songwriters (Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman) who had created movie magic with Julie Andrews in Mary Poppins seven years earlier. Playing an apprentice witch in World War II London and environs, Lansbury sings the Sherman Brothers score, including the Oscar nominated “The Age of Not Believing”, with the same verve she brought to her Broadway triumphs. The film which has entertained several generations of youngsters since, was her last made in Hollywood film.

ANASTASIA (1997), directed by Don Bluth and Gary Goldman

This beautifully detailed animated rendering of the search for the lost daughter of the Russian Royal Family was a re-imagining of the Ingrid Bergman-Yul Brynner-Helen Hayes classic. The ill-advised and ill-informed subplot had a resurrected mad monk Rasputin as its principal villain. If they had to resurrect someone it should have been one of the Bolsheviks who killed her family, but this is after all, a cartoon, so why do anything that resembles real history?

No matter, the heart of the story is the central relationship between Anastasia, voiced by Meg Ryan, the man who finds her, voiced by John Cusack and the Dowager Queen now living in Paris, voiced by Lansbury. Lansbury’s voice work here is about as perfect as any actor’s has ever been. She also gets to sing “Once Upon a December”, arguably a better song than the film’s Oscar nominated song, “Journey to the Past”.