The playwright recalled: “She said: 'I just want to say, I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you’re drunk, and it bothers me.' She said this with such love …and concern. And there’s the time she took a drunk Terrence McNally aside for a maternal word at Sondheim’s 50th birthday party. Among the tributes attesting to her niceness, there have been reminders that during the Aids crisis, she raised funds for research. Instances of her consideration are abundant. As she once said of her work ethic: “It's like being on a bicycle – I just put my foot down and keep going.” She never, to my knowledge, skipped a show to “work on her mental health”. Despite contending with tragedies – her father dying when she was nine, her family uprooted to the States as a result of the Blitz, her first husband a closeted gay, her children succumbing to hard drugs, her Malibu home burnt to the ground – she ploughed on, refused to over-share.
Like the late Queen, she loved to slip in, without any fuss, to watch shows. Though she had the world hanging on her every word, Dame Angela was good at keeping mum, and stayed out of the red carpet limelight. Can you imagine Dame Angela hitting Twitter to rant, as one cast-member of Cabaret recently did, in a typical outburst, “Oh you really are a knob mate #ToryScumOut”? Mind you, she’s mild in her wording compared to some of her peers.
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I’ve heard producers here complain they struggle to get big names, with film and TV careers, to commit to more than 12 weeks in the West End, let alone go touring.īut don’t dare criticise them if you’re an ordinary Joe: Carrie Hope Fletcher got aggrieved on Twitter last year at someone who was – understandably – peeved by her barely advance-advertised absence from a Cinderella matinee. Most stars treading the boards are lightweights by comparison. She played the mad, cannibalistic pie-making Mrs Lovett in the Broadway premiere of Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd for 12 months, and then went on a six-city road tour of the US. Some octogenarians might have stepped aside and rested up – she went on with the help of a cane, and that got woven into the story.Īs a performer, the stamina of the woman was an example to us all. A decade ago, a hairline fracture was diagnosed in her right hip, three days before the opening of a Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man. Too often these days, you find that performances you’ve trekked across town to see have been subject to last-minute change or cancelled. To start with: her diligence and self-denial. A gent himself, he politely didn’t add that some lessons could be learnt from that graciousness, and graft. Fellow actor (and noted TV sleuth too) David Suchet tweeted “She epitomised grace”. Without wishing unfairly to hold a magnifying glass up to every shortcoming or slipup to which the acting profession today is prone, often inevitably enough, it’s striking that the kind of self-composure, commitment and, yes, gentility that was a hallmark of Lansbury’s approach to life and art looks in too short supply in the age of snowflakery and social media self-promotion. There’s a feeling abroad that she was one of a kind, and the last of a kind. But they’re also alluding to her decency, restraint and kindness. When people talk about her death marking the end of an era, they’re referring to a career that took in Golden Age Hollywood and the post-war heyday of the Broadway musical. Like millions of other people I spent some of today looking over the obituaries and tributes to Angela Lansbury, marvelling not only at her incredible body of work, spanning nine decades, but also at her distinctive personality.
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