At least three nations could fairly claim hold of Dame Angela Lansbury. The universally adored actor, who has died in Los Angeles at the age of 96, was born to a prosperous political family in north London. After moving to the US in her teenage years, she signed to MGM and became a regular player in American cinema.
Her mother was from Belfast and, as long ago as the early 1970s, she set up home in east Cork. That blurring of national identity — her speaking voice could be taken for patrician American — helped cement the impression she belonged to the whole world.
Initially a supporting player, later a Broadway star and favourite of Steven Sondheim, eventually a television superstar on Murder She Wrote, she combined superhuman warmth with an occasional edge — most potently in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd — that risked taking out your eye. With her death, one more connection with cinema of Hollywood’s golden era is severed.
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She was born and raised in St Pancras, the daughter of Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant, and Moyna Macgill, an actor who, born to middle-class Ulster parents, took occasional roles in films up to the 1960s. Her grandfather was George Lansbury, the social reformer who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935, and she retained a keen interest in politics throughout her life. “It has been erroneously reported that I am a republican! I am not a republican.” she barked in 2012. “I’m a huge Obama fan. I’ve already voted for him by absentee ballot. I am Democrat from the ground up.”
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She was only nine years old when, in the midst of the Blitz, her recently widowed mother moved the family to the United States. Having already studied acting and dancing in London, she got her first job performing cabaret in Montreal when she was just 16. The family later relocated to Los Angeles, where she moved among such unlikely figures as the spiritualist Jiddu Krishnamurti and the author Aldous Huxley.
Still a teenager, she earned a role opposite Ingrid Bergman as the cheeky maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight and, in 1945, picked up an Oscar nomination for the role.
It would be wrong to say she was catapulted into stardom, but for the next decade and a half she toiled regularly as an admired character actor. Good-looking, but not dazzling in the style then expected of matinee idols, she did good work in The Picture of Dorian Gray, State of the Union and, opposite Danny Kaye in The Court Jester.
In 1945, she married Richard Cromwell, an actor, artist and decorator, but the union soon ended in an apparently amicable divorce. Four years later she married the British actor and producer Peter Shaw. Both took US citizenship in 1951. In the mid-1950s, unhappy with what MGM was putting her way, she ended her contract and went freelance.
It was not until the early 1960s that Lansbury’s potential achieved something like realisation. Her performance as a savagely malign mother to Lawrence Harvey (actually just three years her junior) in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate gave Hollywood one of its most enduring villains. A few seconds of her steely glare rubbishes any notion that Lansbury was at home to only cosiness. She received her third Oscar nomination and, for all the brilliance of Patty Duke’s winning role in The Miracle Worker, probably deserved to take the prize.
By the time she reached 40, she had somehow already achieved the status of an apparently long-beloved icon. There was something about her urbane, endlessly civilised manner that gave the impression she had been around forever.
It is said she turned down juicy roles in The Killing of Sister George and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, but by then she had established her reputation as a titan of the theatre. Her turn in the musical Mame won her a Tony and cemented an already burgeoning popularity in the gay community. “Miss Lansbury is a singing-dancing actress, not a singer or dancer who also acts,” the New York Times sagely noted. Her style was very different from the operatic flugelhorn of Rosalind Russell, who had played Mame in a non-musical film.
Many fine roles followed. She played Gertrude in Hamlet for Peter Hall. She got strong reviews for Edward Albee’s All Over in the West End. It will surprise some to learn that Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street received mixed notices in 1979, but her performance as the hideous Mrs Lovett, who gleefully makes pies from human flesh, is now recognised as one of most memorable in Broadway history. All successive occupiers of the role look back to her just as all those who play Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady look back to Rex Harrison.
By that stage she had set up her home in Co Cork. It was somewhere to get away from all the bustle, but it seems to have become something like a proper home. “I am very, very comfortable there,” she said of her house in Ballycotton in 2014. “I find it an extraordinarily warm, informal place to live. I am left alone there. On the street, people say, ‘Hi, how are you?’ I say, ‘I’m grand, how are you?’ It is a very secure place to be. I love Ireland for that reason.”
Theatre is theatre. Film is film. By the late 20th century, however, nothing earned you a more secure place in the world’s affection than a hit television show. Running from 1984 until 1996 — and set to play eternally on repeats — Murder, She Wrote remains the gold standard for cosy crime. Created by William Link and Richard Levinson, who had devised the immortal Columbo, the show cast Lansbury as the dogged, friendly mystery writer Jessica Fletcher.
There was, of course, something of Miss Marple about the role, but Fletcher was livelier, chummier and less prone to hooded evasion. The mysteries were cleanly plotted. It was, however, Lansbury’s comforting charm that brought viewers back. She was nominated on 12 occasions for the role at the Emmys, but, astonishingly, never won. The show toured the world, touching down in Ireland for some well-remembered, twinkly specials. During this era, kids of all ages connected with her as the voice of Mrs Potts in Disney’s wonderful Beauty and the Beast.
Her husband, Peter Shaw, died in 2003. She is survived by two sons, a daughter and by millions of fans who naively believed — witty and articulate to the end — she would go on forever. She was from everywhere, but in one small regard Cork ruled over all. “I am a mixture of Irish, English, Scottish: all of that is very close to my heart,” she said in that 2014 interview. “I drink very strong tea. You can’t get it in London. I’ll have to get some Barry’s, but I don’t know where.”
