Angela Lansbury, Dead At 96: Was She A Great Trouper, Or The Greatest Trouper?

After a long career that was as varied as it was distinguished — and that had not, as it happened, even come to an end — Angela Lansbury died today at the age of 96. 

Now 96 is, under most circumstances, a highly desirable old age. And yet I, and many others, shuddered to learn of Dame Angela’s death. She’d been an awe-inspiring presence in so many lives that we WANTED her to live forever, even if we could not expect her to. Was she a great trouper, or the greatest trouper? 

She was born in 1925. Her mom was an Irish actress and her dad was a leftist timber merchant. Her dad’s death when she was nine compelled her to escape into worlds where she created, and acted out, the characters in it. In the midst of the Blitz, she traveled with her mother to North America (her mom had a job looking after children being evacuated from Great Britain to Canada) and started accruing stage experience. Her mother was socially well-connected, and at a party she hosted, Angela was introduced to the Gaslight screenwriter John Van Druten, who suggested to director George Cukor that she would do well as Nancy, the scheming maid in an upcoming photo play he was penning. 

So Lansbury, then not yet twenty, started her film career on the top floor: major director, major studio (MGM), major cast (Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer were the leads). She did NOT squander the opportunity. Her work in 1944’s Gaslight was stellar. First off, she was what Austin Powers would call “dead sexy.” Second, the swagger she brought to her performance complemented the increasing helplessness portrayed by Bergman’s Paula, but there was never any question of upstaging the lead actress. (Not for nothing was she nominated for Best Supporting Actress in, let us not forget, her screen debut; she would later go on to win an honorary Oscar in 2013.)

George Cukor was one of many who felt that MGM, upon signing her to a contract that lasted through 1952, didn’t take advantage of Lansbury’s particular talents. Her filmography from that period is motley but also filled with delights if you look at it from a certain angle. Her work as the temporary Dorian Gray fiancée Sybil Vane in the florid 1945 The Picture of Dorian Gray can’t be faulted, nor can her performance as a mean-girl-redeemed opposite Judy Garland in 1946’s The Harvey Girls. And 1949’s Samson and Delilah is a Cecil B. DeMille picture, with all the hoo-hah that implies and/or promises. While not considered top-flight at the time, these movies now serve nicely as little time capsules showing what the simple folk did for entertainment back in the day. (That’s a Camelot reference, people; I’m not really calling the moviegoing masses of the past “simple folk.”)

After going freelance, she never quite graduated to leading lady, but she worked with directors of serious credibility. She played Minnie Littlejohn, the long-suffering mistress of Orson Welles’ Will Varner, in The Long Hot Summer, an odd Faulkner-Tennessee Williams mashup helmed by Martin Ritt. She also appeared in Vincente Minnelli’s slight but agreeable The Reluctant Debutante, to pleasant effect. During this time she encountered a different problem from what she experienced in her contract days: Hollywood kept casting her in supporting roles where she was asked to play older than she actually was. For the most part she was able to make more than the most of this. Her first really iconic film role, one supposes, was as the pure evil actual mother — as opposed to stepmother — of Laurence Harvey’s robotic assassin in the still-shocking 1962 paranoid thriller The Manchurian Candidate. She was only three years older than her onscreen son Harvey, but watching her performance you never perceive whatever vexation she might have felt. Instead, she’s utterly  committed to this grasping, greedy character maniacally fixated on gaining power and, by implication, hanging on to what remains of her youth. She’s terrifying. 

She plays a snippy, snotty adulteress in the wonderful 1964 The World of Henry Orient (still one of the greatest movies about being young and mixed up in a fairytale Manhattan) but refuses to play the role broadly; there’s a delicate precision to her work here. The 1960s was also the decade that Lansbury took Broadway by storm: in 1966 she played the title role in Mame, a smash hit; she reprised the same role nearly twenty years later, in a 1983 revival, and reportedly didn’t miss a step. And the end of the sixties came her Disneyfication: a role in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Her work in that movie was so winning that most of us think she was in a lot more Disney fare, but no. Beauty and the Beast came twenty years later. If the film work wasn’t so strong in the ‘70s, the stage work killed, sometimes semi-literally: Folks who saw Lansbury opposite Len Cariou in the 1979 production of Stephen Sondheim’s murder musical Sweeney Todd speak of the show in more-than-reverent tones.

Now. Let’s talk about Murder, She Wrote. The CBS television show debuted in 1984 and ran for twelve seasons. Set in the quaint Maine town of Cabot Cove, its Lansbury-portrayed heroine was plucky bestselling mystery author Jessica Fletcher, who took time off from her writing to solve a different murder every week. Although every now and again the murder would be in a major city where Jessica was teaching or doing a book signing, lest viewers come to believe that Cabot Cove had an unusually high homicide rate. 

Lansbury’s old school bona fides were instrumental one assumes, in attracting guest stars for each episode that were, and remain, pure TCM bait. Martin Balsam, Tony Bill, Ernest Borgnine, George Chakiris, Cyd Charisse, José Ferrer, Stewart Granger, Kim Hunter, Shirley Jones, Patricia Neal, Ruth Roman, Cesar Romero, Mickey Rooney. And believe it or not, the likes of Joaquin Phoenix and Eric Rohmer and Wim Wenders leading man Patrick Bauchau found their way onto the show, too. The result was one of the most peculiarly potent television entertainments of its time. It’s not like the mysteries were that challenging; it was more like Murder was kind of an epitome of televised comfort food, with enough of an eccentric side to render it something other than pablum. And Lansbury, by now a genuine older woman, played Fletcher as a super-smart individual of great kindness who nevertheless was simply not going to be patronized or condescended to. Feminist icon? Damn straight.

I’m sure that many other houses besides my own are in mourning over the death of Angela Lansbury. But she sure was — and will remain — something super special in the Kenny menage. My wife and I bonded over a shared affection for Lansbury, and for Murder, She Wrote when we were first dating. (You, dear reader, will likely never hear me sing my special lyrics to the Murder She Wrote theme — “And now she’s typing/and riding/a bike” — but my poor wife has had to listen many, many times.) And so we made a point of seeing her every time she returned to the Broadway stage in the 21st century. First was Deuce, a not-quite two-hander with the divine Marian Seldes. The play was a mixed bag, but Angela and Marian elated us. Her performance as Madame Arcati (and her first whack at the delightful comic role, as it happened) in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, in 2014, was perfection. (And a nice almost-closing-bracket in her career; in Montreal in the 1940s, she had a nightclub act singing Coward songs.) I cannot speak coherently of the sublimity of the 2009 Lansbury A Little Night Music. (Lansbury’s association with Sondheim is very nearly as iconic as Elaine Stritch’s.) And in 2012, playing a voluble politico in a revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, she was…well what can you say? The all-star cast also featured James Earl Jones, Candice Bergen, Michael McKean, John Laroquette…but for us she was first among equals. 

It killed us that we could not get tickets to see Lansbury in a stage reading of The Importance of Being Earnest in 2019. But I think we did all right by her (and God knows had she come back to Broadway post-pandemic we would make damn sure to show up with bells on). And SHE did better than all right, for all of us. Even while enduring tumult in her personal life (her two children went through addiction struggles in the 1960s but rallied, and her son Anthony subsequently became a professional collaborator, directing a slew of Murder, She Wrote episodes), she always showed up, always gave her all, always entertained, and was never precious or pretentious about anything. God bless Angela Lansbury. 

Veteran critic Glenn Kenny reviews‎ new releases at RogerEbert.com, the New York Times, and, as befits someone of his advanced age, the AARP magazine. He blogs, very occasionally, at Some Came Running and tweets, mostly in jest, at @glenn__kenny. He is the author of the acclaimed 2020 book Made Men: The Story of Goodfellas, published by Hanover Square Press.