Actress and singer Angela Lansbury, best known for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, passed away this morning only 5 days shy of what would have been her 97th birthday.
What is most remarkable about Lansbury's career which spanned eight decades was that her greatest success came after she turned 60. Although Lansbury was thrice nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (twice in her early 20's) and won four Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical during the 1960's and 1970's, it was Jessica Fletcher which made Lansbury a household name the world over.
Murder, She Wrote has been off the air for more than 25 years. Its last TV movie aired almost 20 years ago and yet it is airing somewhere in the world right now and most of that owes to Lansbury. Although it wasn't a bad thing to be an older woman on TV during the 1980's as Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan and especially Betty White could attest with The Golden Girls, Lansbury was a lead. For a medium increasingly devoted to youth it is astonishing Lansbury led for as long as she did.
In a sense, Lansbury was born to play Jessica Fletcher. After all, Lansbury was being cast as a woman much older than she actually was as was the case when she played Elvis Presley's mother in Blue Hawaii despite an age difference of 10 years. Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey when she was cast as his mother in The Manchurian Candidate, a chilling performance which earned her a third Academy Award nomination. While Jessica Fletcher was 180 degrees away from Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate and more than 20 years apart, it meant that Lansbury finally hit the peak of her career when she played a role which embodied her age to which people of all ages responded warmly. R.I.P.
No comments:
Post a Comment