SLEUTH AS OLD AS TIME
Obit, I wrote… Esteemed actress Angela Lansbury has died on the cusp of her 97th birthday. So immortalised is she as amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote that one can forget the breadth of her 80-year career. The daughter of Communist activist Edgar Lansbury and actress Moyna Macgill, Lansbury devoured cinema from a young age and moved to the States in pursuit of a career. The momentum was swift from there: Her Hollywood debut in her teens, as a maid in Gaslight, was acclaimed and Oscar nominated, and she quickly followed suit with commercial success National Velvet and a second Oscar nomination in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Established as an MGM regular, her career stalled by virtue of being cast in middling films, usually typecast as nefarious characters much older than her. After splitting with the studio, Lansbury remained active in film and her apex came as the villain in The Manchurian Candidate. She very effectively conveyed the utter horror of her character, a senator’s wife who brainwashes her soldier son (Laurence Harvey, merely three years her junior) to commit all the necessary murders for her husband to become president.
Her film career intertwined with a fruitful stage one. After a rocky Broadway start with a short-lived, panned experimental musical, she struck stardom aged 41 as fabulously-dressed eccentric Mame Dennis in Mame. She delighted audiences with her warmth and dazzle, and became a Tony winner and a gay hero. More song-and-dance roles followed, with Dear World, Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd adding to her Tony count. On the 70s silver screen, she delighted youth for decades to come as the lead in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and the tail end of the decade delivered a duet of acclaimed Christie roles in Death on the Nile and The Mirror Crack’d. The latter saw her play Miss Marple, which built the prototype for her incoming jackpot role.
Plans for Lansbury to play Marple in subsequent films fell through when The Mirror Crack’d bombed at the box office. Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link noted Lansbury’s performance and reckoned her a good fit for the Marple-esque protagonist of their upcoming project. She agreed to the part, Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, and the rest is history. The mystery novelist-turned-amateur sleuth was groundbreaking in TV as a strong older woman lead, and despite the murder theme was a reassuringly comfy presence. Lansbury spent the next twelve years (plus subsequent TV movies and an eternity of reruns) helping the local police crack the suspiciously high number of murder cases in her small Maine town.
The smash success of the programme secured Lansbury superstardom for the rest of her days. 20 years after Bedknobs, she furnished her Disney bona fides as the voice of teapot Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. She memorably performed the theme song, and despite her initial hesitance to sing it, she nailed it in one take. She continued to be a film/TV/stage triple threat well into old age, winning a fifth Tony for Blithe Spirit and a lifetime achievement Oscar and Tony. Honoured with the damehood in 2014, Lansbury herself was a humble class act held in equal regard off the screen and stage as she was on it.
Lansbury was a popular pick, becoming the 15th name to be struck off this year’s Drop 40, and recent whispers through the autograph community grapevine suggested she was on the way out. While many doubtlessly shred their 2023 rough draft, 61 2022 rosters pen their latest success. Among the best sellers are Deathlist.net, Just Yvonne, in eternum+’s Wrinkly Dicks, and a quartet of jokers.
Angela Lansbury
16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022, aged 96
61 TEAMS (💀💀💀💀💀 + 40 = 8 POINTS, 🃏 (x4) 16 POINTS)