Descriptors like “Broadway royalty” tend to be thrown around too loosely. But there is no disputing the claim to that title of Angela Lansbury, who died on Tuesday, just five days shy of her 97th birthday. She was a theater grande dame of a species that has largely gone the way of the dinosaurs. It’s tempting to imagine a reverent hush passing over New York’s most hallowed stages tonight, along with those in London, as they welcome yet another fabulous ghost.
Lansbury was the class, the rare public figure whose elegant sophistication was matched by her approachability. When she wasn’t on the actual stage, performing tirelessly in plays and musicals well into her eighth decade, I saw her many times at the theater as a regular.
Usually dressed in a chic trouser suit with inconspicuous gold jewellery, her patrician bearing – and perhaps a pair of sensible heels – made her appear taller, more imposing than her 5’8″. She was unfailingly gracious with audience members , professing their fandom, but her granny warmth also made it clear that respectful distance is in order.
I met Lansbury only once, when I was Chief Theater Critic at Diversityat the publication’s 100th anniversary party in Los Angeles in 2005. She arrived with an entourage and seemed to have gone unnoticed, so I took it upon myself to greet her.
I found out from page 6 of that week New York Post that Lansbury attended the radically shortened Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Victorian slasher musical Sweeney Toddwhich starred Patti LuPone playing the tuba as Mrs. Lovett.
This unusually spicy part, a Fleet Street patisserie owner who finds a new way to dispose of the bodies sent by the revenge-hungry “demon barber,” is a Lansbury piece created in 1979. It won her the fourth of five Tony Awards in competition categories, followed by sixth for overall work in 2022.
Lansbury was effusive in her praise of the revival, explaining how it is closer to Sondheim’s original Grand Guignol concept than the industrial epic that Harold Prince’s premiere production became. We talked about her history with the show, partnering first with Len Cariou and then George Hearn on a tour that was taped for telecast during the Los Angeles engagement, the footage becoming a vital resource for fans of the great musical theater.
I put my foot in all shared Sweeney Todd However, I love when I noticed that LuPone’s interpretation of Mrs. Lovett was quite different from Lansbury’s. “Yes, quite different,” came the curt reply, her smile turning icy and almost ending the conversation. I was tutored by Angela Lansbury!
This ability to instantly turn friendliness into coldness contributed to some of Lansbury’s greatest performances, perhaps most notably as the manipulative matriarch of a prominent Washington political family in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 neo-noir, The Manchurian candidate. Her characterization proved so indelible that Meryl Streep’s role in Jonathan Demme’s 2004 remake pales in comparison.
Frankenheimer’s Cold War classic earned Lansbury her third Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress, unfortunately she won none of them. The first was for her screen debut in George Cukor’s 1944 film Gas light, playing Nancy, the sassy maid whose attitude further unsettles the paranoid mistress of the house, played by Ingrid Bergman. The second was like the broke pub singer dumped by the Cadish aristocrat of the title in 1945. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Despite her promising start in the movies, Hollywood rarely knows what to do with Lansbury’s distinctive talent. It wasn’t until the 1970s that she really began to re-emerge as a beloved presence, first as an apprentice witch who opens up a world of magic to the children left in her care during a Disney war Handles for beds and brooms.
Perhaps it was Lansbury’s camp look, riding a broomstick in a war helmet with a sword held high, that landed her such incredible roles as the self-dramatizing romance novelist Salome Otterburn in Agatha Christie’s star-studded 1978 adaptation. Death of the Nile.
Next meeting Christie, playing the writer’s famous detective Miss Marple in 1980. The mirror cracked, was less successful. But it no doubt helped sow the seed for Lansbury’s casting a few years later in the role that remains for many her most iconic, as Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer and amateur detective, was preoccupied with an unusual number of murders in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine, on CBS’ Murder, she wrote.
This Sunday night hit ran for 12 seasons, spawning spin-offs and even a Magnum, PI crossover episode. The show earned Lansbury a record 12 Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, again without a win for either Murder, she wrote nor the six other times she was nominated. Maybe the TV Academy is overdue to cough up a career honor like the Oscars did in 2014.
Lansbury’s biggest exposure came from her screen work, including one of her most treasured characters, the voice of Mrs. Potts, the castle cook-turned-kettle in Disney’s 1991 animated classic. Beauty and the Beast. Her recording of the film’s title song is almost scientifically impossible to listen to without getting teary-eyed. She continued her association with Disney with one of her last film roles, a poignant cameo as The Balloon Lady in 2018. Mary Poppins is back.
But for anyone lucky enough to have witnessed Lansbury’s work on stage, this is where she will be best remembered. Her Broadway career spanned more than half a century, including musical warhorses such as Mom and a gypsy. She even managed to get Tony out of Jerry Herman’s high-profile flop Dear world and won another as the slimy clairvoyant Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s farce Blithe Spirit.
Her work in Broadway plays includes Tony Richardson’s original 1961 production of the British kitchen sink drama, Taste of honeyand her last role was in the all-star ensemble of Gore Vidal’s election satire, The best man, appearing with John Larroquette, Eric McCormack, James Earl Jones, Candice Bergen and Michael McKean. Lansbury’s character’s candid opinions about what women in America like and dislike in their presidents and first ladies were a stunning masterclass in sharp performance.
2007 Comedy A couple may not be remembered among the seminal works of the prolific Terence McNally. But any play that casts Lansbury and another grande dame of the stage, Marian Seldes, as ex-tennis pros and makes the entire audience gasp in shock when Jessica Fletcher throws out “the C word” can’t be that bad.
Given how fresh Sondheim’s loss remains, it’s inevitable that Lansbury’s longtime relationship with the composer resonates poignantly. They first worked together in 1964 for a short time Anyone can blow the whistlestarring Lansbury opposite Lee Remick in a show that closed after only 12 performances and has rarely been produced since.
This musical stage debut may have been inauspicious for some, but Lansbury turned it into a flourishing career, landing one of her signature roles (and the first of her Tonys), in Mom, just two years later. She worked with Sondheim again (and won another Tony) in 1974 a gypsy revival and then triumphed in 1979 Sweeney Todd.
Mrs. Lovett may be an eccentric scoundrel willing to sell pies made of human flesh to get through hard times and help the man she loves, but the desperate longing Lansbury infuses the character with makes her a tragic figure of a haunting vulnerability beneath a cheerful gruff exterior.
It wasn’t Lansbury’s last Broadway role, but I’ll choose to think about Sondheim and Wheeler’s 2009 revival. A Little Night Music like her swan song. As the mother of the famous beauty Desiree Armfeldt, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Lansbury spends much of the show in a wheelchair, a magnificent relic of old-world European hubris, observing the amorous follies of everyone around her and not missing a beat.
Madame Armfeld only has one solo number, “Liaisons,” but what a gorgeous song it is. A memory of things past – champagne and jewels, sumptuous feasts and glittering dresses, meetings with earls and kings – this was filled by Lansbury with equal parts sorrow and humor, pride and sad wisdom. She faced the looming specter of her mortality with a defiant twinkle in her eye, raising her glass in a toast, “To death!” I’d like to think that’s how she went out, carried away by the many glimmers of memory.