Singular

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Angela Lansbury died earlier this week. She was just short of her 97th birthday.

I’m from a generation, sociology and geography that mostly knows her from Murder She Wrote and thousand viewings of Beauty and the Beast when my kids were little, and the bit of trivia that she was in, and exceptional, in one of my favorites, Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.

But if I ever want to know how important an actor really is, today as in 2004, I go to Sheila O’Malley:

If you think there is another career like Angela Lansbury’s – if you think a comparison can be made to somebody else’s career – you’re wrong. There IS nobody else. If Judy Garland were still around, doing television and movies and Broadway, then MAYBE. But other than that: Angela Lansbury stands (stood) alone. Angela Lansbury never rested on her laurels, and never stopped working. She showed up everywhere. She was bone-chilling in The Manchurian Candidate. She was sassy and insouciant as Elizabeth Taylor’s teenage sister in National Velvet. She was Auntie Mame. She was Mrs. Lovett. She was Jessica Fletcher, dammit.

It’s high time I watched Gaslight again.

22 thoughts on “Singular”

  1. Gosh Mitch, if you want to watch Gaslight, just tune in to ABC, CBS, NBC, NPR, MPR, MSNBC or CNN.

  2. Greg, while the actors you mention may be motivated by true malevolence, they are after all only murky hacks, Angela illuminates.

  4. For my money, the two most terrifying movie villains are Harry Powell, as played by Robert Mitchum in “Night of the Hunter’” and Eleanor Shaw, as played by Angela Lansbury in “The Manchurian Candidate.” If you have not seen these performances, make haste to do so.

  5. She also insistied that Murder She Wrote management hire her actress friends that she had made over the years. As woman age they get less acting gigs, and we don’t need to get into a discussion on that. But the gigs they got through Angela meant they stayed active enough to keep their membership and benefits in the Screen Actors Guild, and yes, we don’t need to get into that either.

    I don’t think much of Hollywood looks out for each other.

    Good for her.

  6. I was privileged to see Angela Lansbury on Broadway in Sweeney Todd.

    Her portrayal of the diabolically ambitious political wife and quasi-incestuous (less quasi in the book) mother in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate is simply masterful. Can anyone who watches that film ever look with his previous innocence upon a bottle of Heinz Ketchup?

    Not many artists have those three great arcs to their career: film, theatre and television. The woman had range!

  7. Angela Lansbury was the guest of honor at The Players’ Pipe Night honoring Audra McDonald. Of course, the topic of the election came up.

    “There is one thing I would like to say about that,” said the normally even-tempered 87-year-old, becoming indignant. “It has been erroneously reported that I am a Republican! I am not a Republican.”

    “It’s all over the Internet and It’s bizarre,” continued Lansbury, best remembered as Jessica Fletcher on Murder She Wrote. “I’m a huge Obama fan. I’ve already voted for him by absentee ballot. I am Democrat from the ground up.”

    Bye Felicia.

  8. Moderation on a tribute to Angela Lansbury Akismet is working OT.

    Say there Tom — so Trump’s claim that Pelosi failed to call law enforcement on January 6 is undermined by the literal video evidence of Pelosi calling law enforcement. Any thoughts…

  9. ^^Threadjack.^^
    Orders from headquarters: make the election about Trump, who is not running for office, rather than the shitty job the democrats have done with the economy, the border, Afghanistan, etc,

  12. UMMP, I happen to be at an undisclosed location just North of Minnesota’s shotgun/rifle deer hunting line. I’m staying with an Ojibwe family. Leaving tomorrow because (checks notes) fuck snow.

    These people up here are pretty damn pissed off, and aren’t gonna take it any more.

    Wish I could pass that along to Minnesota’s disgraced Lieutenant Governor… So do they, but as I understand it, she don’t hang around in Native circles much.

  13. It’s a twofer woolly— hoping you’d send the email and then MBerg would spring me from moderation. Is that a strategy or a tactic…..

  16. Back to the topic, that is cool that Lansbury got gigs for others who were getting on in age. I remember, though, my amusement at the premiss of “Murder She Wrote”; wherever she went, somebody got killed, yet somehow she kept getting invitations. I guess I’ll have to forgive her political and theological liberalism.

  17. “Bedknob and Broomstick”

    I honestly thought you were referring to Bikebubble and rAT, Bigman!

    Lol

  19. Ultra Maga Mammuthus Primigenesis on October 14, 2022 at 12:00 pm said:
    ^^Threadjack.^^
    Orders from headquarters: make the election about Trump, who is not running for office, rather than the shitty job the democrats have done with the economy, the border, Afghanistan, etc,

  20. My parents adored her. My in-laws adored her. I always thought she exuded talent and class. I think the Steven Sondheim quote was something like “ I audition everyone except Angela Lansbury”. That says it all.

  21. Almost unbelievable NY Times poll: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/17/us/politics/republicans-economy-nyt-siena-poll.html?smid=url-share

    The biggest shift came from women who identified as independent voters. In September, they favored Democrats by 14 points. Now, independent women backed Republicans by 18 points — a striking swing given the polarization of the American electorate and how intensely Democrats have focused on that group and on the threat Republicans pose to abortion rights.

    That’s a 32 point swing by female independents in one month.
    And, as I noted in an earlier comment:
    But the poll showed that Republicans opened up a 10-percentage point lead among crucial independent voters, compared with a three-point edge for Democrats in September, as undecided voters moved toward Republicans.

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