[Angela Lansbury, who died this week at 96, was a proud socialist
who achieved enormous success in film, theater, and TV. Yet her
astonishing range was botched by the Hollywood studio system —
preventing her movie career from flourishing even more.]
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ANGELA LANSBURY WAS A BRILLIANT ACTOR AND A COMRADE  
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Eileen Jones
October 13, 2022
Jacobin
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_ Angela Lansbury, who died this week at 96, was a proud socialist
who achieved enormous success in film, theater, and TV. Yet her
astonishing range was botched by the Hollywood studio system —
preventing her movie career from flourishing even more. _

Lansbury in the trailer for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945),
Wikimedia Commons

 

It’s good to discover, in reading the tributes to Angela Lansbury
— who died on Tuesday at age ninety-six — that the beloved actor
reportedly considered herself “a proud socialist
[[link removed]].”

She was a comrade via her illustrious lineage
[[link removed]]:
her father was Edgar Lansbury, the British socialist politician, and
her grandfather was George Lansbury, the pacifist, socialist, and
leader of the British Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. Her mother was
Irish actor Moyna Macgill, and they were fleeing the Nazi bombings of
England during the London Blitz when they arrived in New York City in
1940 seeking access to the entertainment industry. They gradually
wound their way to Hollywood in 1942, where teenage Angela
Lansbury’s astonishing career really began.

Lansbury was the rare actor who achieved so much multifaceted success
over so many decades in such a variety of media — film, theater,
television — that several generations of audiences who loved her
could be thinking of her quite differently.

Legions remember her fondly as friendly, practical sixty-something
crime fiction writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fetcher in the
massively popular TV series _Murder, She Wrote_ (1984–1996). Kids
raised on the 1991 Disney animated version of _Beauty and the
Beast_ recall with affection Lansbury’s motherly teapot character
Mrs Potts singing the title song. I have a friend who’s been
obsessed since childhood with the part-live-action,
part-animated _Bedknobs and Broomsticks_ (1971), featuring Lansbury
as a magic-practicing, singing, dancing, Nazi-fighting would-be witch
and reluctant nanny.

Lansbury was the rare actor who achieved so much success over so many
decades that several generations who loved her could be thinking of
her quite differently.

Dedicated theatergoers probably remember her most reverently as a
triple-threat talent who achieved smashing successes playing such
divergent characters as the dazzling, life-loving eccentric Auntie
Mame, in the original 1966 musical _Mame_, and the slatternly,
murderous Mrs Lovett in Steven Sondheim’s savagely dark _Sweeney
Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street_ (1978).

The indomitable Lansbury was still taking Broadway roles right up
through age eighty-eight, with her portrayal of Madame Aracati in
Noël Coward’s _Blithe Spirit_ in 2014. As late as 2016, she
considered doing the demanding dramatic part of the possessive
grandmother in a stage revival of Enid Bagnold’s _The Chalk
Garden_, before finally accepting that it would be too much for her.

Though a huge film fan from her early youth, Lansbury considered
[[link removed]] the
stage her primary career: “The theater always came first. Movies
were incidental.” But personally, I’m entirely dedicated to her
great film performances. There are so many of them, though almost
invariably in supporting roles, it’s a wonder the Hollywood studio
system so botched her film career that theater looked good by
comparison.

What a natural she was on film! She was Oscar-nominated for Best
Supporting Actress for two of her first three roles in her incredible
debut year of 1944–45. She was nominated three times, but never won,
and was nominated eighteen times for Emmys — whereas in the theater
world, she seemed to win a Tony Award every time she turned around.

Lansbury in the trailer for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).
(Wikimedia Commons)

Her famous first movie role, for which she was cast at age seventeen,
was as the sly, insolent Cockney maid Nancy in the Gothic
melodrama _Gaslight_ (1944). Up against stars Ingrid Bergman and
Charles Boyer, both giving tremendous performances, Lansbury brings
such casual lewdness to Nancy’s flirtations with “the master,”
while treating “the mistress” with such slack, frowsy impudence,
it’s still eye-popping to watch today.

She demonstrated her effortless range immediately by playing the
comical supporting role of Edwina, the sweetly boy-crazy teenage older
sister of Velvet Brown (Elizabeth Taylor) in _National
Velvet_ (1944). And she followed that up with a stunningly poignant
performance in _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ (1945), playing Sibyl
Vane, the innocent young singer in a tatty family-run tavern theater
who has the misfortune to fall in love with wealthy, exquisite
man-about-town Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) just as he begins
experimenting with the callous pursuit of pleasure.

Lansbury’s Sibyl Vane role was a difficult one to make credible so
many years after the silent film era, because the sweet “ruined
girl” of melodrama had become such a trite character. She was all
but mocked out of existence in the wisecracking 1940s. But young
Lansbury imbues her with freshly sorrowful conviction, so that it’s
painful to see such a flower-like naif crushed. Lansbury never looked
lovelier than when she played Sibyl Vane. Whereas the deliberately
unglamorous lighting on the Nancy character in _Gaslight _emphasizes
Lansbury’s full face, especially the sullen downturned mouth, the
black-and-white cinematography in _Dorian Gray_ softly molds her
cheekbones and dramatizes her big glowing eyes.

Stardom and lead roles should’ve followed, but MGM made a mess of
it, keeping her in supporting roles and casting her, as Lansbury put
it in one of her biographies, as “a series of venal bitches” many
years older than Lansbury’s actual age. A typical role was as
hard-bitten Em in the Judy Garland musical _The Harvey
Girls_ (1946). Em is the lead entertainer in a Wild West dancehall
and, under the same roof, the implied madam of the brothel, who’s
clearly supposed to be pushing forty.

Lansbury in a scene from MGM’s Till the Clouds Roll By (1946).
(Wikimedia Commons)

Part of the problem for Lansbury in having these roles forced upon her
was that she was too damn good in them. She looked young, but readily
achieved the effect of much older, worldlier women. Performing the
raucous song-and-dance number “Oh You Kid” in _The Harvey Girls_,
twenty-one-year-old Lansbury even finds a way to dance jadedly,
tossing up her legs in a humorous, lazy fashion that communicates how
aware she is that she’s entertaining a mob of drunks who only want
to look up her skirt anyway, so precise choreography is hardly
required.

And at age twenty-three in_ State of the Union_ (1948), she’s
playing the icy newspaper owner determined to be even tougher than her
press tycoon father once was. She’s also running the campaign of the
man she’s trying to get elected president, played by fifty-something
Spencer Tracy. She and the candidate are involved in an intense affair
that’s threatening his marriage to a formidable wife, portrayed by
Katharine Hepburn. Once again, Lansbury more than holds her own in
scenes with two powerhouse stars — in fact, she dominates their
scenes, something that rarely happened to Tracy or Hepburn.

Lansbury could always pivot easily from drama to comedy to musical,
and all the shades in between. She’s at her ease and getting all her
laughs as spoiled young Princess Gwendolyn, constantly threatening to
“throw myself from the highest turret” if she doesn’t get her
own way in the riotous Danny Kaye farce _The Court Jester_ (1955).
But just three years later, she makes an easy adjustment to the role
of a middle-aged, gossipy gorgon-mother trying to land a wealthy
aristocratic husband for her awkward debutante daughter in Vincente
Minnelli’s classy comedy starring the ultrasophisticated couple Rex
Harrison and Kay Kendall, _The Reluctant Debutante_ (1958).

Lansbury and Joan Plowright in A Taste of Honey on Broadway in 1961.
(Wikimedia Commons)

But even with such consistent displays of extraordinary talent,
Lansbury shocked everyone with her uncompromising performance as the
rancidly horrible mother in_ The Manchurian Candidate_ (1962),
directed by John Frankenheimer. She wasn’t the first choice for the
role. Legend has it that the film’s star, Frank Sinatra, was
stumping for Lucille Ball in the unlikely part of Eleanor Shaw, a
high-level communist operative whose cover role is acting as the
power-behind-the-throne of her husband, boneheaded right-wing
politician Senator Shaw.

The senator is conducting an idiotic but influential anti-communist
witch hunt while simultaneously running for vice president, all at his
wife’s direction, in a thoroughly plotted attempt to seize power in
the United States. In exchange for her assent, Eleanor Shaw has sold
her son Raymond (Laurence Harvey, only three years younger than
Lansbury) to the communists, arranging to have him act as the
brainwashed assassin who’ll ultimately murder the president so
Senator Shaw, elected as veep, can succeed him.

Just see how Lansbury as Eleanor Shaw exudes obsessive menace,
watching on primitive black-and-white TV from behind the scenes as her
husband threatens to name an outrageously fictional number of
practicing communists in the Senate. Hovering over the TV screen like
a vulture as she vicariously controls his action, Lansbury adds to the
woman’s power a kind of appalling, agitated, sexualized thrumming
underneath the surface, so that even as she stares fixedly at her
husband, she twitches and shifts compulsively.

The ugly physicality of the performance is harrowing. In the final
confrontation of mother and son, after she’s destroyed him and
they’re heading toward the endgame, she admits everything to him.
She looks haggard and sweaty in this ghastly confessional scene, as if
she were excreting toxins from her pores. And her deranged sexuality
is made manifest when she ends by promising to avenge him once she’s
in power and kisses him hard on the lips during a dreadful fade to
black. After that, it’s only a matter of time before he commits
suicide.

Just think of all those potentially epic leading roles that never were
and how they shadow her movie career!

Lansbury found endless variations on the “venal bitches” she often
played. Her Isabel Boyd character in the coming-of-age comedy _The
World of Henry Orient_ (1964), for example, is another monstrous
mother with nasty sexual impulses, but she’s entirely different from
Eleanor Shaw in every expression and gesture. Shallow, vain, and
perpetually cheating on her wealthy husband, Isabel already regards
her fourteen-year-old daughter as a rival for the attentions of her
assorted boyfriends. Isabel’s affair with her daughter’s big
crush, the equally shallow, vain, and cheating composer/pianist Henry
Orient, brought Lansbury together with Peter Sellers, and their
initial scene together is a mini masterpiece. They conduct a tawdry
mutual seduction scene in high-flown romantic language and displays of
moral rectitude, during which it’s impossible to tell who’s giving
a better, riper, more precisely acted display of phoniness.

Lansbury did so much brilliant work on film, it’s odd to feel
cheated of all the work she didn’t get to do. But just think of all
those potentially epic leading roles that never were and how they
shadow her movie career! She tartly noted the lost possibilities in
her 1999 authorized biography _Balancing Act,_ as well as the way
she very sensibly moved from medium to medium, following the better
opportunities that came her way. The melancholy is mine!

But at least there’s one more performance to look forward to,
however small it might be. Lansbury’s cameo performance in _Glass
Onion: A Knives Out Mystery_ [[link removed]],
coming out at the end of this year, will be her last onscreen
appearance.

_Eileen Jones is a film critic at Jacobin and author of Filmsuck,
USA. She also hosts a podcast called Filmsuck
[[link removed]]._

_The new issue of Jacobin is out now. Subscribe today
[[link removed]] and get a yearlong
print and digital subscription._

* Angela Lansbury
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* Film
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* television
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* Hollywood
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