Angela Lansbury has died. From Variety:
Actress Angela Lansbury, whose 75-year career encompassed triumphs on the big screen, in musical theater and on television, died at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday, her family announced in a statement obtained by Variety. She was 96 — five days shy of her 97th birthday.
Nominated for three Oscars, she won seven Tony Awards and holds the record for Emmy actress nods with 12 for her role on “Murder, She Wrote.â€
For those of you who only know of Angela Lansbury from Murder She Wrote or as a singing teapot, she was a Hollywood star since her first movie appearance at age 19. That was in 1944 in Gaslight. In it she played the “bad girl”, one of a series of femmes fatales she portrayed in her early days in movies.
Take a gander at her in 1946’s The Harvey Girls. She’s playing a dancehall girl and she was quite beautiful. It’s a shame they didn’t let her sing—she had a pretty fair singing voice as she demonstrated in years on Broadway. Among her memorable roles there were the title role in Mame and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd.
The last role I’ll mention was as Laurence Harvey’s mother in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), despite being just a few years older than Harvey. It wasn’t that she had aged but that she had the presence, the poise to carry the role off. She carried it off well enough that her performance garnerd an Academy Award nomination (she’d already won one Academy Award for Gaslight).
I mourn her passing but celebrate her many contributions. She was one of the last surviving bona fide stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood. It’s a shame her performance as Mame wasn’t captured on film (Lucille Ball championed making the movie—clearly, she wanted the role).
Loved her dignity and her positive attitude, with every one of these losses I feel myself pulled towards the grave by simple demographics.
But hey! Dick Van Dyke is still working.