You must face the age of not believing
Doubting everything you ever knew
Until at last you start believing
There’s something wonderful in you
Dame Angela Lansbury, who died at her home today in Los Angeles at the age of 96, is perhaps best known today as Jessica Fletcher in the acclaimed TV series Murder, She Wrote and in the Broadway stage plays and musicals in significant parts that Hollywood never gave her. But well before that, the Irish-British transplant to America (she and her family left Britain at the height of Nazi Germany’s bombing campaign of her home nation) made her career as mostly a character actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood. She may not have been a major star billed at the top of marquees and movie posters during her time while contracted to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), but she would come to be a recognizable figure to audiences of multiple generations – whether she might be playing a tough saloon owner with a belter of a singing voice, a schoolteacher just making ends meet, Elvis’ mother (despite a nine-year age difference), princesses and queens, the amoral and scheming wife of a political candidate, an emotionally manipulative mother, or a teapot matriarch.
She stepped onto a movie soundstage for the first time at seventeen years of age, while making Gaslight (1944) for MGM. Because she was still technically a minor, she had to be accompanied by a social worker while working on set. Despite this, director George Cukor and her co-stars (including Ingrid Bergman) treated her as equals, all of them recognizing right away her professionality and acting ability. Perhaps producers and studio executives might not have done the same, saddling her so often with character roles, but Lansbury – by all accounts – extended that same kindness Cukor and Bergman afforded to her to so many others over the decades, leaving a legacy that goes beyond whatever personal disappointments she may have had over the more considerable roles she never got to play.
Her distinction as Hollywood royalty came later in life, as our connections of Hollywood’s Golden Age are almost all gone.
Nine of the films Angela Lansbury appeared in follow (left-right, descending):
Gaslight (1944) – directed by George Cukor; also starring Charles Boyer, Ingrid Bergman, Joseph Cotten, and Dame May Whitty
The Harvey Girls (1946) – directed by George Sidney; also starring Judy Garland, John Hodiak, Ray Bolger, Preston Foster, Virginia O’Brien, Kenny Baker, Marjorie Main, Chill Wills, Selena Royle, and Cyd Charisse
The Three Musketeers (1949) – directed by George Sidney; also starring Lana Turner, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Van Heflin, Frank Morgan, and Vincent Price
The Court Jester (1955) – directed by Melvin Frank and Norman Panama; also starring Danny Kaye, Glynis Johns, Basil Rathbone, and Cecil Parker
The Manchurian Candidate (1962) – directed by John Frankenheimer; also starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) – directed by Robert Stevenson and Ward Kimball; also starring David Tomlinson, Roddy McDowall, Sam Jaffe, John Ericson, Cindy O’Callaghan, Ian Weighill, and Roy Snart
Death on the Nile (1978) – directed by John Guillermin; also starring Peter Ustinov, Jane Birkin, Lois Chiles, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, Jon Finch, Olivia Hussey, I.S. Johar, George Kennedy, Simon MacCorkindale, David Niven, Maggie Smith, and Jack Warden
Beauty and the Beast (1991) – directed by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise; also starring Paige O’Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, Jerry Orbach, David Ogden Stiers, Rex Everhart, Jesse Corti, and Bradley Pierce
Mary Poppins Returns (2018) – directed by Rob Marshall; also starring Emily Blunt, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Pixie Davies, Nathanael Saleh, Joel Dawson, Julie Walters, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, David Warner, and Dick Van Dyke
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