Murder, she wrote, but movies, she slayed

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/10/2022 (1424 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Angela Lansbury, the English-born performer whose career spanned eight decades, died this week at age 96.

For many people, she is best known as Jessica Fletcher, the star character in the TV show Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996). Playing a mystery writer-turned-sleuth who lives in the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove — a picturesque little community with an alarmingly high murder rate — Lansbury was 58 when she started the series and into her 70s by the end of its long run.

There is an unfortunate societal tendency to look at older women and assume they’ve always been older women. And Lansbury so perfected Jessica Fletcher’s style, a mix of smartly accessorized but comfortable separates and sensible, mid-heeled shoes, that viewers might think she always looked this way.

It’s important and illuminating, then, to go back to Lansbury’s early career.

Lansbury got her first Oscar nomination for a sharp little role in Gaslight (the 1944 version — there’s also a good one from 1940). In this menacing melodrama — from which the term “gaslighting,” the currently much-discussed form of psychological abuse gets its name — a sinister Charles Boyer is deceitfully manipulating his new wife, the luminous Ingrid Bergman, into questioning her sanity. Lansbury plays the Cockney maid Boyer brings in to further undermine Bergman’s confidence, and in her few brief scenes, she indelibly creates a saucy minx with a wonderfully sardonic approach to the deferential behaviour expected from Victorian servants.

The following year, she received another Oscar nom for playing Sybil Vane, an innocent tavern singer with a pure soprano voice and angelic face, in The Picture of Dorian Gray. In this adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s story of a man who stays young and beautiful while his hidden portrait gradually becomes aged and vicious, Dorian seduces Sybil and then heartlessly abandons her, one of his few “unspeakable acts” the filmmakers can demonstrate onscreen.

Clearly, the young Lansbury was hard to pin down, with an assured intelligence and a beauty that was striking but not conventional. It seems as if Hollywood, not quite knowing what to do with her, decided to make her prematurely middle-aged.

In Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah, she played Hedy Lamarr’s older sister, even though she was 11 years younger than Lamarr. Frank Capra’s State of the Union cast the 23-year-old Lansbury as a scheming, right-wing, 40-something newspaper magnate. At 36, she played Elvis Presley’s mom in Blue Hawaii.

Perhaps her best-known artificially aged role is in the feverishly paranoid political thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). Here Lansbury plays the manipulative, monstrous mother of Laurence Harvey, at a time when she was 37 and Harvey was 34. Lansbury is controlled, controlling and packed with unrelenting ideological evil. And while that three-year age gap between mother and son is a supremely absurd example of gendered Hollywood math, the relationship between Lansbury and Harvey is so enmeshed and unsettling and Oedipal that it actually works, in a magnificently perverse kind of way.

By the time of the 1978 version of Death on the Nile, Lansbury’s biological age seems to have finally caught up to her screen age. In this star-packed murder mystery, she plays Salome Otterbourne, an alcoholic, narcissistic middle-aged novelist jangling with eccentric jewelry and known for writing about what she likes to call “the sex instinct.”

And finally, we have Lansbury’s long stint on Murder, She Wrote. The show may have been cosy and formulaic, but at a time when few women of Lansbury’s age were getting starring TV roles, her Jessica Fletcher was independent, intrepid and vital. Whether she was doing a spot of detective work in her hometown or travelling about, helping a seemingly endless supply of nephews, nieces and first cousins who got themselves into crime-adjacent pickles, she was unflappable and sharply observant. Like the older female detectives who came before her, Jessica Fletcher made use of the fact that people tended to underestimate her. (Lansbury had, in fact, previously played Miss Marple, the grandmother of this trope.)

Fans will get a chance to see Lansbury one last time in a posthumous performance in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, which will be released this Christmas. Let’s hope it’s a fitting send-off for a vibrant, versatile actor.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca

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