Remembering Angela Lansbury

I can say this in all honesty, I was too good an actress. I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face. I'm not going to sleep in the same room with her. See the way she looked at me? She earned an Oscar nomination at 19 and a Tony Award at 83. In between, Angela Lansbury's career spanned seven decades and countless transformations on stage, screen and television. Her lasting popularity was a testament to the determination and talent of a woman whom Hollywood studios did not see as their leading lady. I am a character actress, first and foremost, although the one area that I was not a character actress, really, was playing Jessica Fletcher. And the proof is right here. The photograph of your fiancé. This photograph. It was missing the night of the fire. Jessica Fletcher was probably about as close, not to me, but to the sort of woman that I might have been had I not been an actress. Angela Bridget Lansbury was born in London in 1925. Her mother, Moina McGill, was a successful London actress. Her father, Edgar Lansbury, a businessman. But her happy childhood was cut short at age nine when her father died of cancer. The business sort of fell off appreciably, and my mother found herself a widow with four children, and her income was very much reduced. She sold everything, books, everything. World War II had begun. The family emigrated to the U.S. After a dangerous ship crossing, they made their way to New York. Eventually, they moved to California, where Moina hoped she and her daughter could break into movies. While working in a department store, 17-year-old Angela was called in to audition for a role in MGM's The Picture of Dorian Gray. So I went out to MGM Studios with my mother because I was a minor, and by golly, we are immediately not taken to see the director-producer of The Picture of Dorian Gray, but we're rushed in to see George Cukor, who is going to direct the movie Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This is Elizabeth, the cook. Hello. You'll find that she's in good health. I really didn't know what I was doing. I look at the picture now, and I say, how the devil did you have the experience? See you Sunday? Perhaps. Usual place? Usual place. Night. I had not been around the block. I didn't have boyfriends. I didn't know anything. And yet here was this woman, you know, this girl, because I was only 17, behaving as if, you know, I knew it all. But I knew how to act knowing it all. Not with me. I can take care of myself when I want to. For her very first film role, she was nominated for an Oscar in 1944. She also won the singing role of Sybil Vane in Dorian Gray, and the next year she was nominated again. She didn't win either time, but saw it as a blessing. You once said that you are lucky you didn't win because you might not have become as good an actress if you had won. I believe that. I've often felt earning an Academy Award too early is a terrible deterrent because you don't know what to do next. But while her professional life flourished, behind the scenes were personal setbacks. When Lansbury was 19, she wed for the first time to actor Richard Cromwell, but the marriage quickly fell apart. It never should have happened. It was something that he, as an individual, really tried to will himself into. But it was not possible because he was a gay man, and therefore he walked away from it. And I was absolutely, oh, I mean it was like the end of my life when that happened. So it was a terrible, terrible shock to me. Not long after, she met Peter Shaw, a young actor who would be the love of her life and have a profound influence on her career. When he came into my life on a blind date, we just kind of locked emotionally together, and we never looked back. He was really not a good enough actor, and I'm quite well known for having said this to him, and he would have been the first person to agree. I said, Peter, you're a terrific guy, but you're not an actor. He left acting to become an agent and eventually managed his wife's career. He became my mentor, my manager, everything. But after a promising start in film, she was typecast in second-level character roles, often much older than herself. They weren't going to groom me to be an over-the-title star, but then I never was really that kind of material. If I had been knocked down fantastic, you know, Betty Grable legs and, you know, this and this and this, maybe I would have been able to force them to put me up there and to build me into a big movie star. But I was hampered by the fact that I was, and I can say this in all honesty, I was too good an actress. I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face. In 1961, director John Frankenheimer offered what would be her most famous film role, Mrs. Iceland in The Manchurian Candidate. You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head. And I really have to give John Frankenheimer full credit. He was relentless in his passion to make this woman the essence of evil. Now we have come almost to the end. One last step. There are speeches in which he talks about, you know, what they have done to you. We did it in one take. Why? Because the preparation was so intense that it had to come that way or no way. I want to talk to you about that communist tart. Shut up with that mother, shut up! It was one of the great, great roles of my career. I'm forever thankful that I had the chance to do it. I want the nominee to be dead about 2 minutes after he begins his acceptance speech. You were a favorite to win the Oscar for Supporting Actress that year, and you didn't that night. It went to Patty Duke in The Miracle Worker. That was a night that I wouldn't want to have to live through again. You know, there are times in your life you think, this could be it, this could be it. I had a special dress made. Oh, I don't know, it's just... I think soon after that, I came to New York. In the mid-'60s, Angela Lansbury returned to the theatre. In 1966, she played the title role in Jerry Herman's musical Maine. If he walked in... The show was a smash hit, and she won her first Tony Award. That was very heady business for me. I had to take on a mantle of stardom. It was all about glamour, and glamour was something that I'd never kind of allowed myself to be associated with. It was not the happiest time. My life, in a sense, has always been kind of divided into two parts, family and career. The sad part, in my mind, was that I didn't succeed particularly well. The family suffered, the career soared. The children, we discovered, had fallen into the same traps that many, many kids during that period of our social history, which they were into drugs. And we had no recourse in those days. I mean, really, we did not know what to do. It was a terrible, terrible time. She decided to bring her family to her ancestral land, Ireland. I found this house. It had 20 acres and a walled garden. I mean, I said, well, we can all live here. So I bought it. Finally, everybody, we all came over, and we started our life anew, absolutely. In Ireland, the family found stability. Well, yes, we can do that, of course. Then, in 1979, came the stage role for which she strongly felt she would be best remembered on Broadway. Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd. She was not an evil woman. Well, she's pretty naughty, but nevertheless. I think that her fun and the humour that was so marvellous in The Little Priest appealed to audiences worldwide. And then, of course, when the show was put on film, a whole generation of youngsters saw it who otherwise wouldn't have known who the hell Angela Lansbury was. Diana, I'm so sorry you're not feeling well. But it would be another five years before Angela Lansbury would become a true household name with the debut of Murder, She Wrote. I hate to impose on you like this, but I really do need clarification. Her role as the gentle but wise amateur detective Jessica Fletcher would last 12 seasons. She noticed things. She had an ability to pick up on little bits and pieces of information which solved crimes. I couldn't help but notice the no-smoking sign on your desk in the office. How much of Jessica Fletcher was Angela Lansbury? Well, not really any of her. Not really any of her. But let's say my sensitivity, yes, at times, because those things are going to reveal themselves. And any time you're in Maine, you let me cook you up some lobster stew. I'll do that. Yes, certainly. That's me responding to a situation. I'm going to reveal a side of myself which is real, you know. Yes, certainly. You managed to exercise a lot of creative control on the show. For instance, several times it was suggested that Jessica Fletcher have a love interest and you rejected it completely. Yes, I did. This is all moving just too fast for a widow woman from Maine. I can respect that. You sure? I felt that the minute I got into something like that, I was destroying, I was destroying the mystique of Jessica. I'm sorry, Jess. Not that she was a flirt, don't misunderstand me, but I wanted to feel always that circumstances just didn't allow it to happen, sadly. Her husband, Peter Shaw, died in 2003. They had been wed for 53 years. After his death, she grieved deeply. A few years later, she moved to New York and returned to Broadway. In 2009, she won her 5th Tony Award for playing Madame Arkady in Blythe's Spirit. Ms. Lansbury was 83 years old. What would you like your legacy to be? That, through my acting, I enabled people to get out of their own lives and to be allowed to be transported into other areas of life that they otherwise would never have. I'd love to be able to feel that I enabled people to do that. Life is so hard for so many people.