Appreciation: Angela Lansbury, an instantly recognizable and readily transformable talent
Angela Lansbury, who achieved widespread fame as the star of the long-running CBS series “Murder, She Wrote” and was the recipient of six Tony Awards , was never to be confused with any other performer. A royal in exile, astringently self-possessed, her syllables arrayed like fine china, she was at once instantly recognizable and readily transformable., didn’t disappear into her roles, but she could play anything. She was as much a character actor as she was a star.
The daughter of an affluent English timber merchant and politician who died when she was 9, Lansbury was just a teenager when she signed a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after having left Britain with her actor mother and brothers during World War II. She was selling cosmetics at a Los Angeles department store at the time to help support her family when studio boss Louis B. Mayer, impressed with her screen test, took a shine to her.
Curiously, it was after one of her most indelible film performances, playing the treacherous mother in the 1962 classic “The Manchurian Candidate,” that she decided it was time to pursue her dream of musical theater. The prospect of being typecast by Hollywood as a maternal terror galvanized her to action. As Lansbury explained when I interviewed her at her Brentwood home in 2014, “You can’t live down a part like that. I decided, ‘Forget it. I’m going to sing now.
Playing the title role of the extravagantly glamorous New York bohemian who finds herself suddenly saddled with a kid, Lansbury won the first of her Tony Awards. But something more important was gained: The respected utility player had become a bona fide Broadway star. No matter what else she did — and there would be much more —In a 1985 television interview with Barbara Walters, Lansbury recalled “humbling” herself to get the part.
Lansbury’s ability to be both broad and subtle, larger than life yet unmistakably human, was indispensable in introducing the world to “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” Critics were initially respectful but full of doubts about this bloody, Brechtian musical thriller by Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. Lansbury, who by this time had become widely beloved for casting spells in the 1971 Disney film “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” brought out the comedy without undercutting the horror.
Sondheim’s ingenious madness found the ideal singing character actor. A brilliant theatrical technician capable of juggling cleverness with clowning, she honored Sondheim’s wildly original lyrics with her own musical precision while making the outlandish scenario fiendishly entertaining.
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