Like the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, Angela Lansbury’s career spanned so many decades and cultural upheavals that she seemed “as constant and as comforting as the blue sky above,” MJSchulman writes.
Unless you are hovering around a hundred, you probably can’t remember a time when Angela Lansbury wasn’t famous. Like the reign of Queen Elizabeth II, her career spanned so many decades and cultural upheavals that she seemed as constant and as comforting as the blue sky above. Both Lansbury andwere hardy British matrons who elicited the affection given to a grandmother, and both were as likely to be found in glitzy regalia as in a simple wool cardigan.
And yet it would be wrong to reduce Lansbury to the show-biz equivalent of a cozy cup of tea. Her career was so long and varied that it’s harder to encapsulate than it is to skim the highlights and marvel at how different they are. In the Hollywood studio system of the nineteen-fifties and early sixties, she was often cast as shrews or noxious mothers. In the later sixties and seventies, she was a brassy Broadway belter in “Mame” and “Gypsy.” She was the unlikely star of a 1988.
Like many character actors, Lansbury didn’t achieve her full potential until middle age, and her first forty years—despite the trio of Oscar nominations—were something of a run-up to what came after. She was born in London in 1925, to the Irish actress Moyna MacGill and the English lumber merchant Edgar Lansbury. Her father passed away shortly before her tenth birthday. She recalled, “I was an old lady at ten. When my father died, I became the partner with my mother in bringing up my brothers.
She could have easily faded into history, a side player from a bygone age of cinema, were it not for her self-reinvention as a Broadway powerhouse. “All those years I had this vision that someday I’d blossom forth, that I’d show everybody what I was really capable of,” she recalled. “I could see myself singing, dancing, carrying on, being the life of the party, hogging the limelight—the works. Nobody knew—not even my family. Butknew.
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