We knew she was very old, but she had been in the landscape for so long, practically unchanged, that we thought she was almost eternal. Loved by cinema, boards and TV, actress Angela Lansbury died at the venerable age of 96 on October 11 at the end of an 80-year career: respect. She was also the last representative of the Golden Age of Hollywood, which is paradoxical, insofar as she herself never felt part of this era. glamour. Indeed, by her own admission, it was despite her appearance that she made a career there. And a brilliant career, it was.
Born in London in 1925, Angela Lansbury had a comfortable childhood in a well-to-do family: Edgar Lansbury, her father, was a successful lumber salesman, and Moyna Macgill, her mother, was an actress in demand. It was when her father died of cancer, when she was 9 years old, that Angela Lansbury took refuge in the game, playing different characters in order to escape from reality.
Uninterested in school, she liked to say that she had essentially educated herself, by reading and watching films, almost compulsively.
In 1940, in order to escape the bombardments, Moyna Macgill immigrated to the United States with her offspring: direction New York, after a brief stopover in Montreal. With a scholarship in her pocket, Angela Lansbury completed her acting training and landed her first professional theater contract by pretending to be 19 when she was only 16. At that time, the teenager was the sole breadwinner in her family, as her mother was fired from her job.
Friend with many gay artists and intellectuals, Angela Lansbury was spotted at a party by screenwriter John Van Druten, who recommended her in 1944 to the MGM studio for the role of the petty maid in the film Gaslight (Hantise), by George Cuckor, facing an Ingrid Bergman that Charles Boyer tries to drive crazy. Hired despite her minor age (she was 17), she made a name for herself with her memorable performance as a deceitful young girl, which earned her the first of her three Oscar nominations for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
Believing rightly that she was bursting the screen, the publication Variety wrote that Angela Lansbury had gone from unknown to star in four days. In the aftermath, MGM offered him a seven-year contract.
Broadway Calling
Conscious of not having the physique of a young premiere, and reluctant to undergo a reinvention of the studio with a lot of plastic surgery, Angela Lansbury immediately favored said supporting roles, thus multiplying the compositions in all imaginable registers, at the opposed to stars often confined to one type of character.
In the daily The Telegraph, she confided in this regard in 2015:
“They could have ‘built’ me up, like they did with Deborah Kerr, but quite frankly, I don’t think I was sexy enough in the look department. I was all about talent, and nothing about looks. »
In 1945, she shone again in The Picture of Dorian Gray (The Portrait of Dorian Gray), after Oscar Wilde, in the role of a tragic singer. Second Oscar nomination.
The films followed, of varying quality, but each time with an irreproachable contribution on his part. From the 1950s, very busy, we will keep the memory of his Minnie in The Long Hot Summer (The Fires of Summer), by Martin Ritt, after William Faulkner, with the couple Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, and where she portrays the impatient mistress of Orson Welles.
The 1960s were also prosperous, opening with the musical bluette blue hawaii (Under Blue Hawaiian Skies) where, at age 36, she played the mother of 26-year-old Elvis Presley. In 1962, John Frankenheimer gave her not one, but two of his best career roles: that of Warren Beatty’s overproducing mother in the drama All Fall Down (The angel of violence), and, above all, that of the manipulative mother – the word is weak – by Laurence Harvey in the political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (A crime in the head). Third Oscar nomination.
It was also during the 1960s that Angela Lansbury began to make crowds run on Broadway, where she notably created the title role in Mom (1966), as an eccentric and whimsical aunt, and that of Mrs. Lovett, the murderous and loving restaurateur in Sweeney Todd (1979): two musicals that immediately became classics, both of which won her Tony awards (she won six in all).
A television triumph
From the 1970s, she became rarer in the cinema, preferring the theater, where the first roles rained. In an attempt to recreate the magic of Mary Poppinsthe Disney studio gave him the star in the whimsical comedy Bedknobs and Broomsticks (The Apprentice Witch), where, as a nice witch, she watches over three children against the backdrop of the Second World War. In 1978, she proved to be hilarious in Death on the Nile (Death on the Nile), an opulent and star-studded adaptation — Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow — of Agatha Christie’s novel in which she plays an alcoholic and libidinous author of erotic novels who has eyes only for Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov, his brother-in-law in the city).
In 1980, she returned to the world of Agatha Christie, this time playing the sagacious Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d (The Mirror Shattered), opposite Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor, whom she had already given the counterpart in 1944 in the family classic National Velvet (The Great National).
We also note, in 1984, her tasty performance as a grandmother in the horrifying and poetic The Company of Wolves (The Company of Wolves), by Neil Jordan.
In the same year, she hit the proverbial “ jackpot on television when, against the advice of her agent, she agreed to star in a detective series conceived by the creators of Colombo : Murder, She Wrote (She writes murder). Jessica Fletcher, this retired teacher turned successful author, Angela Lansbury saw her sometimes as an American Miss Marple, sometimes as an extension of herself, as she specified in 1985 to Barbara Walters. The series, which nailed tens of millions of people to their TVs every week, continued until 1996.
In recent years, we were happy to find it in the credits of youth success Nanny McPhee (Nanny McPhee) as a haughty great-aunt. And as moviegoers will have a chance to find out when the film hits theaters next, Angela Lansbury worked until the end, appearing posthumously in a very funny scene from the crime comedy. Glass Union: A Knives Out Mystery, by Ryan Johnson. This will then be, basically, the proof that she is indeed immortal.