Angela Lansbury was cast older, harder and less kind than she was, and made those parts the best thing on screen. Maid or teapot, she never told us what to feel about her.
Fi1m perspective
Nancy the maid comes into the drawing room in Gaslight (1944) with a cigarette, a London vowel and no interest at all in hiding what she thinks of her mistress. It was Lansbury's first film. Every time Nancy came in we sat up, because she is the only person in that house who is not afraid, and a film about a woman being talked out of her mind needs one person who says what she thinks. She is a jolt each time, and the house scenes are sharper for it.
MGM signed her on the strength of it and then spent years casting her as the maid, the mother and the woman older and harder than the actress playing her. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) came within a year. Her own verdict on the studio's thinking was blunt: "I was all talent and no looks." The habit stuck, and the part most often named as her best on screen is Eleanor Iselin in John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a mother of a kind nobody would wish on a son. It is the film people mean when they say the studios used her badly for so long.
The turn came on stage. Mame (1966) made her a star there in a way films never had, and Mrs Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd (1979) let her be funny and dreadful at once. Television did the rest. Twelve years as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996) made her, for a whole generation, the sensible woman who notices things, and the image had a cost: the darker parts came less often, and she turned down at least one that might have suited her.
Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991) is where the two halves of the career meet. She is a teapot, she is a mother, and she has to sing the title song over two people who are only just working out that they like each other. She does it as if she would rather not intrude, and it is the warmest thing in the film without once telling us that it is warm. Orbach and Stiers do the jokes; she is the reason the castle feels like somewhere you could live.
Start with Gaslight and then go straight to the teapot. Nearly fifty years apart, the maid who despises her mistress and the housekeeper who loves everybody are played the same way: she gives us the person and leaves the verdict to us.
Biography
Angela Lansbury was a British-American actress. She made her film debut in Gaslight (1944) and voiced Mrs. Potts in the Disney animated feature Beauty and the Beast (1991). Other film roles include The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
Lansbury starred as Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). She also appeared in later films such as Nanny McPhee (2005), Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018), and provided voices for Anastasia (1997) and The Grinch (2018).
