Angela Lansbury's Best Film and TV Roles
Dame Angela Lansbury passed away on October 11, 2022, leaving behind a storied career in film, TV and the stage. She was one of the last remaining stars of Hollywood's Golden Age, and while in the spotlight, she worked alongside such actors as Ingrid Bergman, Danny Kaye, Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and many more. Although to many younger generations, she's known for her family-friendly roles, such as Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1992) or Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), she played a variety of women and proved herself extremely versatile.To get more news about
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From a scheming maid and a manipulative power-obsessed matriarch to a murderer who makes people into meat pies and an amateur sleuth, she was far from being pigeonholed into any one type of role. In an Associated Press Interview in 2008, she was quoted as saying, "I want women my age to be represented the way they are, which is vital, productive members of society." And until the end, she stretched her acting chops as far as she could.
Lansbury made her film debut at age 17 in Gaslight (1944), directed by George Cukor. It tells the story of Paula Alquist Anton (Ingrid Bergman), who marries widower Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer) and is driven to question her own sanity by her husband's manipulative tactics. Lansbury plays the maid, Nancy Oliver, who assists Anton in his games. She made an icy splash onto the scene as this cavalier and conniving young woman. Her performance made such an impression that it earned her a nomination for Best Supporting Actress and secured her a role in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), where she played Sybil Vane.
Based on a novel of the same name, The Manchurian Candidate (1962) saw Lansbury as a politically motivated and controlling mother, Eleanor Iselin, whose son Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) becomes a mindless trained assassin. Once again, she tackles an unsympathetic but engaging female character. She is also a woman whose aspirations will cause her to take down anyone in her path until her dramatic end in the film's climax. Lansbury earned yet another Oscar nomination for this role, her third by this point in her career.
???????As one of the original cast members in Stephen Sondheim's dark stage musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Lansbury played the darkly comedic role of Mrs. Lovett. The character is known for her meat pies, but when meat becomes scarce in 1840s London, she resorts to teaming up with barber Sweeney Todd to kill and cook his customers for financial gain. Lansbury imbued the character with zaniness and truly unsettling comedic edge, the likes that Helena Bonham Carter failed to replicate when she took on the role in Tim Burton's 2007 screen adaptation. After the show closed on June 29, 1980, and subsequently toured, it was filmed over four days and released on cable TV on September 12, 1982. The program was nominated for multiple Primetime Emmy Awards, including a nomination for Lansbury.
???????If audiences were unfamiliar with Lansbury's work before, she would become a household name with her role as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996). Intended for actress Jean Stapleton, Lansbury accepted the part after Stapleton turned down the offer from producers to star. She plays a crime novelist and amateur detective who repeatedly comes through with the answer to a gripping real-life mystery by the end of each episode. Lansbury returned to the role of Jessica Fletcher for four made-for-TV movies and received 12 consecutive Emmy nominations during her time on the show.
