Angela Lansbury

 

“Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE (16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022) was an Irish-British^[1] and American actress and singer who played various roles across film, stage, and television. Her career, much of it in the United States, spanned eight decades, and her work received much international attention. She was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema at the time of her death.” – Wikipedia.

It seems that for the past week the universe had been telegraphing me clues. My ‘Witch Itch’ post had prominently figured Bedknobs and Broomsticks; my review of Episode 7 of The Rings of Power was titled “Mordor, She Wrote” (a joke supplied by Kameron); I had even considered Angela Lansbury as the perfect voice for my ”Elderly Princess.” That I should then find that she had passed away just five days shy of her 97^th birthday was a saddening, but, somehow, not an unheralded coincidence.

At first, I had no idea of her already storied career in film and on stage, the highlights of which can be easily looked up and which I need not rehearse here. She always seemed to play characters somewhat older than her actual age. What I chiefly remember beyond Bedknobs and Broomsticks are her roles as Mrs. Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (where she acted with her brother-in-law, Peter Ustinov), as Mommy Fortuna in The Last Unicorn, as the meat-pie maker Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd, of course as Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, and even as Great Aunt Adelaide in Nanny McPhee. For more than five decades she would suddenly pop up somewhere, still going strong; her last film role was released just this year.

Her many accomplishments, her personal story, her family life, are there for anyone to see, and have now drawn to a close. But I would here document the odd private influence that she had on a little boy who is now an old man that has lasted more than fifty years.