Angela Lansbury’s Jessica Fletcher topped Vera and Miss Marple
Whether she was a witch, a detective, a murderer or the mother from hell, Angela Lansbury captivated in all her roles.
She had me at “bobbing along, bobbing along at the bottom of the beautiful briny sea”.
It’s pretty hard not to be transfixed by anything Angela Lansbury did. What role couldn’t she play? She conquered everything from Nazi-fighting witches to evil communist spies, from singing teapots to a character who baked her customers in pies.
And, of course, she was Murder She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher – the greatest of television’s older woman detectives. Don’t come at me with your Veras and your Miss Marples.
When she died, aged 93, in October, friends and family inundated my phone, in a slightly mocking, but mostly sweet way, with messages of “thinking of you” and “omg so sad”. As if my own grandmother had died.
But back to the witch part, that’s what sold me. In a tiny Glasgow flat in the 1990s, my mother – working and studying in her very early 20s – put on the TV to distract her three-year-old.
I remember staring agape. Angela could fly, she danced with cartoon fish, she raised a battalion of reanimated suits of armour to fight the Germans.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks, so unfairly derided as the poor man’s Mary Poppins, introduced me to musicals and World War II and magic. But it was Angela I fell in love with.
FIRST LOVES
Good Angela, Bad Angela: no mystery who stole my heart
Whether she was a witch, a detective, a murderer or the mother from hell, Angela Lansbury captivated in all her roles.
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Pony tale full of feeling, captured at a gallop
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Crystal set radio was my ticket to ride
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Not technically as good a singer as Julie Andrews, to whom she is often compared, but by god, she’s a better actor. And that voice – strong enough – had so much more experience, heart, anger and knowingness.
If your kids watch Bedknobs, listen as she sings the Age of Not Believing to a young lad struggling to admit he’s lost and sad.
“When you set aside your childhood heroes / And your dreams are lost up on a shelf / You’re at the age of not believing / And worst of all you doubt yourself.”
Try not to weep.
She’s the first celebrity I ever clocked, definitely the first I remember.
I was only a kid when I saw the film Beauty and the Beast (1991), but I still knew it was Angela singing the famous title track, in the role of the aforementioned teapot.
Then, like so many young ones, I forgot about magic and musicals and became ever more interested in death and violent crime.
I was blessed with three very old grandparents who loved murder mysteries and police dramas, and that’s where Murder She Wrote came in.
Sitting with Granny Annie – who mainly watched because she thought Angela’s 1980s fashion choices the pinnacle of style – I just couldn’t look away.
At 4pm, on the BBC, every cold winter’s day, I was ready yet again for someone to be murdered in the tiny Maine town of Cabot Cove, and for Fletcher to find the killer.
It was revolutionary at the time: Angela was the biggest star of US TV despite being over 50, her character completely independent and no man around. She perplexed many chauvinistic TV executives.
It’s not perplexing to anyone who watches the show. Fletcher’s so charming, so warm: you’d confess to murdering your brother too.
When the teenage years pounced on me, I took an even darker turn. I got over murder and took an interest in politics. After years with Good Angela, I met Bad Angela. And you don’t get worse than Mrs Iselin in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate.
The controlling mother of a would-be assassin and the wife of a would-be US president, Angela is magnificent as a McCarthy-ist housewife in the pay of Chairman Mao.
When, at the climax, she reveals to her brainwashed son her plot to take over America, she becomes madder and madder, her eyes get bigger and more strained. She practically inhales her own zealotry. Angela should have won the Oscar.
She’s so good in her older films, too, from her debut in Gaslight (1944) with Ingrid Bergman, as the maid who knows too much, to the poor, doomed actress caught in the dastardly Dorian Grey’s web in the 1945 adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece.
Only recently, I saw her for the first time playing opposite Katharine Hepburn in State of the Union (1948), vying with that screen icon for Spencer Tracy’s affections. She’s only 22, but you’d think she was 45.
Lansbury’s talents were never as fully realised in cinemas as on the stage. When I finally admitted that I still loved musicals, I was 19 and living in Perth, and Angela was once more the gateway. Listen to Bad Angela in Sweeney Todd. She won her third Tony for being Mrs Lovett, the pie shop owner who turns to murder to replace her meat supply. Sondheim scores are hard and singing The Worst Pies in London or By the Sea must be vocal torture, but she makes it sound effortless, and god, is she funny.
“Mrs Mooney has a pie shop/ Does her business but I noticed something weird / Lately all her neighbours’ cats have disappeared/ Got to hand it to her / What I call enterprise / Popping pussies into pies.”
Listen to her in Auntie Mame, in Dear World, in A Little Night Music and, most of all, listen to her conquer Mama Rose, the greatest of all musical roles for women, in Gypsy. She’s better as the godawful stage mother than anyone: witness the pain and venom and ardent self-belief in her delivery of “Hold your hats and hallelujah/ Mama’s gonna show it to her”.
Something else important happened when I was 19: I spent a week in the thrall of an older man visiting from Melbourne for the Perth Festival. Afterwards he wanted me to come see him. I wasn’t sure. It was so far, I had never really had a relationship like that before, there was so much I didn’t know.
Then the so-and-so got me.
“I have a spare ticket to see Angela Lansbury in Driving Miss Daisy,” he told me.
I immediately booked the flight.
Driving Miss Daisy is an average play, and Angela was very old by then, but she could still command a stage and was more than a match for her co-star, James Earl Jones, the greatest American stage actor of his generation.
I was falsely promised an after-party, but didn’t get to meet her and I’m glad. I didn’t want to ruin the magic.
Whether she was solving murders, or committing them, singing songs or plotting coups, Angela Lansbury was a weird, comforting constant for me and many, many others.
Show your kids Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Listen to Sweeney Todd. And go dive into Murder She Wrote.