When Lansbury accepted the lead in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, she was almost three decades into a storied film career that had already yielded multiple Academy Award nominations. Read: The 20 most anticipated films of the season On rewatch, it’s certainly a strange hodgepodge of a children’s film, but it succeeds on the back of Lansbury’s unique charm: She’s steely but somehow warm, playing an oddball who’s nonetheless instantly lovable. Lansbury might’ve been one of the first actors I could immediately recognize. Released to mixed reviews, it was at best a modest success, but I watched it constantly on VHS as a child. A jury could debate for weeks over her greatest part and fail to arrive at a definitive answer.īut when I heard the news of her death at the age of 96 yesterday, one film immediately came to mind: Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the 1971 Disney movie that served as a spiritual sequel of sorts to the 1964 smash hit Mary Poppins. Lovett of Stephen Sondheim’s musical masterpiece Sweeney Todd. She played a kindly grandmother figure in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast a much more sinister one in The Company of Wolves the slyly meddlesome amateur sleuth of Murder, She Wrote and the cheerfully resourceful (if murderous and insane) Mrs. She was a chilling villain in The Manchurian Candidate, a flighty and flirty accomplice to the psychological torment of Gaslight, and a winsome tavern singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning an Oscar nomination for each role. Angela Lansbury was a boundlessly versatile performer, with a decades-long career filled with roles that played to her many strengths.
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