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calendar   Saturday - January 25, 2014

on stage and in film since 1944 and before, and still at it. Angela Lansbury, Goddess of the 40s

I think I may be a bit self indulgent here but stay with me for a minute or two.  I have my reasons.  Aside from being in love with an image of a woman from the 1940s.

image

This won’t be the first time I have posted photos of Angela Lansbury here.  In fact, it isn’t even the second time.  It may be the third time but there’s so much more than photos. I learned some things quite by accident today, and also heard an interview on the radio.  She’s making a return to the London stage in a very special theater.  That’s one reason for my interest.

1944. That would make her age 19 in this shot, if it taken in or after October of that year.
image

I have long held the view which I know is one opinion and worth more to me then it might be to our readers.  That opinion being, she was once the single most beautiful woman in Hollywood and possibly the world.  Hollywood never really knew how to use her talent, in spite of her being nominated for the Oscar 2wice. In fact, in 1944 she was nominated for her first film when she was 18, some months shy of her 19th birthday. 
She was again nominated the following year for another film.  At the time, she was the youngest to receive a nomination.

image

For me it all began when.

Going back a very long time ago, I saw a movie the title of which is long forgotten although the image of a blonde Goddess planted itself firmly inside my head.
It was not a large or leading part, she didn’t as I recall have many lines, it was in “glorious technicolor” as Hollywood referred to the process.  But I didn’t know who she was.  And it was many yrs later that I discovered her name.  AND .... it was only due to my association with bmews and the net, that I found early photos of her.  Which at the time I shared on this site and one or two of you expressed some surprise that they were looking at the actress they knew only from the TV show,” Murder, She Wrote”, which was not my kind of thing and so I never watched it.  By then of course the image of the sex siren had given way to, well, hate to say it.  Old age.

Which now brings me back to where I wanted to be to explain something.
During the radio interview she stated that she was never a beautiful woman and was thankful for that, because as film beauty fades, so do the parts and especially if you’re a leading actress.

Mom and:  not so pretty daughter?
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However, she continued by saying that she was always able to get roles as a character actress. And the characters got older with her.  Of course ... she has been highly successful on the stage over the years, until getting the role as Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote.
What floored me was her belief if true, that she was not a beautiful girl or woman.  Horse feathers.  Good gosh.  Her bar must be impossibly high.
How does one get above Goddess rank?  Should that not be the very summit? 

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is a British actress and singer in theatre, television and films. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris and Audra McDonald), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination at the age of eighteen; she earned her second nomination the following year for The Picture of Dorian Gray. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).

The 88-year-old actress is about to perform in London’s West End for the first time in almost 40 years, as the medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
Lansbury won a Tony Award for the role on Broadway.
Last month the actress, who was born in London and moved to the United States in her teens, was made a dame — the female equivalent of a knight — by Queen Elizabeth II.
She said she was pleased to be performing at London’s Gielgud Theatre, where her mother, actress Moyna Macgill, made her stage debut in 1918.
“She was a lovely actress,” Lansbury said. “I get all my talent from her.”

the bbc

Angela’s twin brothers, Edgar Jr., and Bruce , both went on to become Broadway producers, but Bruce is better known for his work on television, such as the series The Wild Wild West, Mission Impossible, and his sister’s Murder She Wrote.

In her later years, Angela Lansbury’s mother made appearances on such television series as Studio One, The Twilight Zone, Dr. Kildare, Mister Ed, I Dream of Jeannie and My Favorite Martian.
She died of throat cancer in Los Angeles, just a few weeks shy of her 80th birthday.

“I’m in a very enviable position, being able to work like this 45 years later. It’s always beginning! I never have a sense of finishing up, just new things beginning. When I die, they’re going to carry me off a stage.”

Angela Lansbury


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Posted by peiper   United Kingdom  on 01/25/2014 at 07:00 AM   
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Oh, and here's some kind of visitor flag counter thingy. Hey, all the cool blogs have one, so I should too. The Visitors Online thingy up at the top doesn't count anything, but it looks neat. It had better, since I paid actual money for it.
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