The first time I likely encountered Ms. Lansbury was in the 1972 children's movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks. My mom took me to see it when it came out. A desperate bid by the House of Mouse to recapture the magic of Mary Poppins in a post-Walt world, I vaguely remember seeing it.
I later became acquainted with her work in the popular series Murder, She Wrote. It, along with Matlock and The Golden Girls, became part of what hipster boomers back in the day called the geriatric nights on television. Even though I wasn't around home then, my mom and dad liked those shows so it was natural I had a chance to see them on television when I was visiting.
Like many things, I remember plenty of mockery aimed at the those shows. Mockery from a generation that they clearly didn't imagine they would some day be in the same age group. See the same contempt leveled at an elderly Frank Sinatra's 1990 concert tour since 74 years old was just too old to be wandering about a stage singing. You have to hand it to a generation that has spent decades deriding what it is destined to become.
Years later I discovered she was more than merely an actress capable of playing doting moms and kindly senior citizens. For my sons, and in the early days of my relationship with my wife, she voiced Mrs. Potts in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. But in the 1944 film Gaslight, she's almost slappable as the snide while sultry maid who helps drive Ingrid Bergman half mad.
Of course one of her stand out roles, and a role that elevated her to a level of villain able to make Darth Vader squirm, was as the cold, heartless mother of Lawrence Shaw in The Manchurian Candidate. Playing a woman so filled with hate mixed with arrogance that she believed she could bring both sides of the Cold War to their knees, you can't watch that without marveling that she was able to play anything but a calculating killer.
I know little of her private life, and perhaps that's a good indicator that she had a life not worth knowing about. In the entertainment industry, that is cherished virtue. In any event, she played a big part in a specific time in my life and the life of my parents. Her influence fell over the early years of my young family, and I came to appreciate her all the more as I found other roles she played in a variety of productions.
For all of that, and simply because, may she rest in peace.
The homicide rate in Detroit has been about 48 per 100,000 in recent years. That in Cabot Cove, Maine was 866 per 100,000.
ReplyDeleteYes, but the capture rate at Cabot Cove was 100%!
DeleteHeh! That's always the joke with any of those shows. The old 'stay away!' response to any one of a dozen pop detectives because anywhere they go, someone gets killed.
DeleteI always admired her as a person for moving her drug addicted kids to Ireland, out of CA bad influences, and taking a year off to be home and do family life. It literally saved her kids. Classy lady.
ReplyDeleteI can believe it. Again, I heard nothing about her own personal life. Not that she was some angel, but compared to what you sometimes hear, she seemed pretty solid. How proud does that make someone in CA, however, to find out getting her kids out of there helped save them. Though they wouldn't be the first to save their lives by getting as far from Hollywood as possible.
DeleteMy rough impression is that the biographies of British actors tend to look like those of ordinary people in their level of obtrusive domestic disorder. Something in the water in Hollywood.
DeleteShe played opposite William Windom on that detective show. Remember My World and Welcome to It? Always enjoyed his performances. Alas, he was married five times.
Ireland isn't much of a refuge anymore.
ReplyDeleteRefuge has always been temporary and limited. We cannot go back to Eden; we can only go forward to Heaven, and that requires that we die.
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