Manhattan is enjoying an unseasonably hot afternoon as I arrive outside Angela Lansbury's apartment in the theatre district. The doormen are loosening their collars, a dog-walker is emerging from a lift, and if a team of showgirls were to suddenly appear to herald the spring, I wouldn't be a bit surprised.
In the bijou Lansbury living room, all is tranquil. The “homestead”, as she calls it, is still in California. She also spends two months of the year in Cork in the Irish Republic. New York is just her office. An orchid blooms on the windowsill, a yucca droops behind her chair, but the view from the window is of sooty walls and air vents - not the sort of thing you would want to spend much time with.
Lansbury is 82, an age at which most of her contemporaries would probably see nothing wrong in kicking back and watching reruns of Murder, She Wrote. Lansbury starred as the crime-novelist sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the series for 12 years, vainly battling to stem a bloodbath in the town of Cabot Cove before the series ended in 1996, a victim of changing audiences.
But Lansbury has been busy since. Last year she starred on Broadway in Deuce, a Terence McNally play about two retired tennis partners. And on Sunday she comes to the London Palladium to be the MC in Jerry Herman's Broadway, a tribute to the composer and lyricist who created such hits as Hello Dolly!, Mack and Mabel, Mame and La Cage aux Folles. Herman himself will be there - and that's something he probably didn't dream of ten years ago, when he was gravely ill with Aids. And so, to give thanks, he is staging the concert to raise £250,000 for the British HIV/Aids charity Cruisaid.
When Lansbury gets back home, though, she plans to relax. “I don't want to play a huge role again,” she says. “I wouldn't mind doing an ensemble piece. But definitely a limited run.” That retiring outlook makes talking to her a little more interesting than talking to the “ordinary” superstar with something new to plug. Mind you, she's still on guard: although she is friendly, she sits opposite me on a stiff-backed chair and bats back measured answers to my questions like a pro.
She can look back on full careers in film, television and theatre. What scandal there was in her life is long gone: her first husband, the actor Richard Cromwell, turned out to be bisexual; and of her children by her second husband, the British-born actor and producer Peter Shaw, Anthony developed a drug addiction in his teens, and Deirdre drank heavily. Peter Shaw died in 2003.
Lansbury was born in London in 1925, the eldest child of four. Her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an actress, and her grandfather, the former Labour Party leader George Lansbury, made a huge impression on her too. “He was in our house a lot. He and my father used to talk politics morning, noon and night.”
This English life was soon disrupted. Her father died early; Moyna remarried, but the match was bad, and she took the children to a new life in America. While her mother hunted for work, Lansbury was left shouldering responsibilities. “I grew up very fast,” she says.
Did she regret that in later years? “Yes, I did. I regretted the fact that I never had great teen years, I just had to be ready to carry part of the financial and emotional load.”
She looked after her siblings in New York until her mother found work as an actress in Los Angeles and called them out. Soon enough, though, it would be Lansbury's turn. She won a role in Gaslight, and would celebrate her 18th birthday on the set with Ingrid Bergman.
Today, Lansbury still speaks and carries herself with a gentility that seems very English. But she feels it would be too hard to live in England again. “I'm just so out of touch with the way they think. I love them but I don't think I'd fit in any more.”
One might suppose that that early experience of pressure and responsibility has moulded Lansbury's career, as she went on to portray strong women who were much older than her. She was mother to Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii; mother and bully to Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate. It's not as simple as that, she says. “I come from a family of very strong women. All of my aunts, my father's sisters, were extraordinary women, so I understood them, but I'm not one of them, I'm really not.”
Was it not galling for a young actress to be typecast in those older roles? “Yes. There came a point when I got sick of dressing myself down, that got to me, but it was at that point that I came to Broadway. By Hollywood's standards I was over the hill, but not for Broadway.”
Her first role on Broadway was in Hotel Paradiso; later she played in Anyone Can Whistle, Stephen Sondheim's first Broadway show; and then the title role in Jerry Herman's Mame, which made her a star. She would go on to play Nelly Lovett in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd, for which she won four Tony Awards.
But failures still irk her. She never got to play a great screen role, she never won an Oscar, and she holds the record for the largest number of Emmy nominations without having won the award. Was there a time when she started to reconcile herself to never getting that big role?
“I guess I did,” she says. “I didn't moon about it, let's put it that way. There was a stage when the pickings were very lean indeed. Probably in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I remember an English friend of mine said to my husband one day: ‘I think Angela has shot her bolt. Her time has gone.' Peter didn't tell me that at the time, he told me later when I had come back.”
But by that stage she had a young family. Her children joined her for periods in New York. She got them tutors. But it wasn't enough to keep them entirely on the straight and narrow. The children, now in their fifties, have since got over their problems (Anthony is a television executive; Deirdre is a restaurateur) but Lansbury was unsettled when she agreed to collaborate on Martin Gottfried's biography and found everything being disinterred.
“I didn't like it very much,” she says. “I forced them to take out an awful lot so that what was left wasn't very interesting. From the point of view of salient facts, it was all in there, but it wasn't a true picture of what went on.
“You know why? He said to me one day: ‘I always think when I'm writing these biographies, that it's like writing a novel.' I almost fell off my chair! But life isn't like a novel. I should never have agreed to it. I wanted him to write about the work. But he was more interested in the scurrilous goings-on. About my children being on drugs. He went to town on that - and almost ruined their lives, and their children's lives, so I made him take it out.”
Lansbury usually makes a point of not talking about her personal troubles. In the past she has struggled to conceal her grief when talking about the loss of her husband: now, five years after his death, she prefers not to talk about it. But she admits that she has always struggled to find a balance between family and career. “Because it's impossible. It's the nature of the work.”
She believes her finest film role was that in The Manchurian Candidate; her greatest stage role was in Mame or Sweeney Todd; but she knows that she won't be remembered for those. “I know my obituary will read: ‘Angela Lansbury, star of Murder, She Wrote'. Everything else will go by the board.”
She's proud of the series, though she looks pained when we speak about its enduring popularity. So what slice of her life would she choose to remember herself by?
“I wouldn't pick any, I'd pick 'em all!” she says. “But the one I've enjoyed the most is the theatre, no question about it. You've got that audience. You can't ask for more than that!”
Angela Lansbury appears in Jerry Herman's Broadway at the London Palladium on Sunday (www.seetickets. com or 0844 4124657)
Source: The London Times
Posted: 28th. April 2008
