Although she was born in London, and retained a classic English poise all her life, Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, was a Hollywood and Broadway star for more than seven decades, and one who was completely unclassifiable. On her film debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win one. She graduated to play Laurence Harvey’s evil, possibly incestuous, mother – although she was only three years older than Harvey – in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and then a dotty amateur witch in Disney’s follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
This versatility, allied to her natural grace, vitality and chastely appealing features – her eyes were full, blue and unblinking, her face almost perfectly round, her mouth a cupid’s bow from the studio era – propelled her to stage stardom in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966) and, in London at the Piccadilly theatre in 1973, as the show-stopping Mama Rose in Gypsy, by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.
