When I interviewed Dame Angela Lansbury at the end of the 1980s for my biography of Albert Finney, she was remarkably frank about her misgivings about playing Gertrude to Finney’s Hamlet a decade earlier at Peter Hall’s National theatre in the South Bank trailblazer.
“We were really rooted to the ground,” she said. “It was very, very spare. At times, Albert resembled a kind of black-clothed paratrooper, while I felt like a rather roughly hewn chess piece …
