How to describe the era that Angela Lansbury spanned? When she was nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her debut film “Under Gaslight” (1944), Alfred Hitchcock was also competing for the best director that year, and the last film she starred in was already September 2022. “Knives Out 2” was released in the United States last month. She seems to be the long end of the golden age of Hollywood in the United States. After 78 years of acting career, she has finally received the last afterglow.
Angela Lansbury was born in London, England in 1925 to Irish actress Moina McGill. Thanks to such family background, Lansbury learned art from an early age. After the outbreak of World War II, Lansbury had to move to New York to continue studying drama in order to avoid the German air raids. After that, she signed a contract with MGM and officially landed on the big screen.
In that star-studded era, heroines usually flowed among Ingrid Bergman, Joan Fontaine, Joan Crawford, and Greer Garson, and Lansbury had to start with supporting roles. She played women much older than she was: the controlling mother, the accomplice to a serial killer who chops up her victims… roles that earned Lansbury three Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress , It also gave her a place in Hollywood. Since 1960, Lansbury has been active in Broadway theaters. With the musical “Mam”, she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical for the first time, and in the next 13 years, she won this award three times. .
After the 1980s, the actresses of Hollywood’s golden age gradually withered. Ingrid Bergman died of cancer in 1982. Although Joan Fontaine occasionally filmed, she almost entered a state of invisibility, but Lansbury, who stood beside the heroine, began to show her profound creative ability . She has performed 12 consecutive seasons of the TV series “Writers and Murder”, and has been nominated for Best Actress at the Emmy Awards for 12 consecutive years. In 2009, she participated in the Broadway play “Blithe Spirit (Happy Ghost)” and won the Tony Award for Best Actress Best Supporting Actress. Even at the age of 89, she still hasn’t stopped working. She returned to London, participated in a stage play, and conveniently won the Laurence Oliver Award, known as the “Tony Award in the British theater industry”.
Compared with the identity of a star, Lansbury is more like an actor who is dedicated to acting as a lifelong career. When she was interviewed by the British media “The Gentlewoman” at the age of 86, she still insisted on this point: “You are rewarded for what you do. Compliments, not for who you are.” That interview concluded with Lansbury’s ongoing burning life: Lansbury dismantled certain long-held assumptions that a woman was old enough to be obsolete, and she Not waiting for time to take away her career and dignity, she just keeps doing the same thing.
In 2022, the 96-year-old Lansbury will appear in the film for the last time. The creator of Knives Out 2 loved Lansbury’s 1971 fantasy film The Flying Universal Bed so much that director Rian Johnson and his team visited Lansbury’s home in Los Angeles. She died shortly after, and in a statement, her family wrote: “It is with sadness that Lady Angela Lansbury’s children announce that at 1.30am on Tuesday, October 11, 2022, the mother died in Los Angeles. Passed away peacefully in her sleep at home. Only 5 days away from her 97th birthday.”
