Some people were just never young I guess.
Angela Lansbury is still alive – she’s ticking along at 94.
In fact, she appeared in a movie as recently as two years ago, with a short
cameo (that included singing!) in Mary Poppins Returns. IMDB also lists
her as involved with a project that’s only just now in pre-production. She’s
not done, and soon she will start to rival Betty White (98) in terms of
longevity. (Though they both still have a ways to go if they want to catch Olivia
de Haviland, who is 103.)
But Angela Lansbury has been an “old woman” for nearly 60
years.
You’d know from some of my recent writing on this blog that
I’m fascinated by actors who play significantly older than their actual age,
the examples I cited being Ian McDiarmid in Return of the Jedi and Max
von Sydow in The Exorcist. Lansbury may have them both beat, though.
Tuesday night I rewatched The Manchurian Candidate,
only my second-ever viewing of the classic. (I’ve also seen the remake, which I
think is pretty good.) It crackled for me just as much as the first time, even
though I was feeling under the weather and watched it in bed on my iPad.
I was struck by the fact that Lansbury plays the mother of the
brainwashed soldier played by Lawrence Harvey, even though she was only 37 at
the time it was released on October 24, 1962, and had only just turned 37 a
week beforehand. That means she was 36 or even 35 during filming – probably 36
as production schedules tended to be shorter back then.
That means – are you ready for this? – she was less than
three years older than Harvey. He was born on October 1, 1928, meaning that
Lansbury was only just about to turn three when he was born. That could be the
lowest age differential I’ve ever seen between actors who are supposed to be
playing parent and child. (Harvey, I think, is supposed to be playing
significantly younger than he actually was.)
The thing is, this was standard practice for Lansbury. I
remembered having this observation about her once before, and went back to
check my blog for when that might have been. It turns out it was while watching
Elvis movies for my Getting Acquainted series back in the day. Just a
year before The Manchurian Candidate she played Elvis’ mother in Blue
Hawaii, though at least there, he had the decency to be almost a full
decade younger than she was. (She’s also a bit of an antagonist in that film,
if memory serves.)
I’m not sure why Lansbury struck casting directors as
prematurely old back then, except that her face always had a certain maturity
to it, and she was certainly talented enough to play those ages. Also, she’d
already been around for nearly 20 years in the early 1960s, as she debuted at age
18 in 1944’s Gaslight.
Now, just because she plays the mother of a grown adult who
has returned from fighting in a war does not necessarily make her character “old.”
A 37-year-old could indeed be the parent of a war veteran. But Harvey himself
looks nothing like some fresh-faced 18-year-old, and is not supposed to be,
either. He’s supposed to be a contemporary of Frank Sinatra, who was actually
nearly a decade older than Lansbury. Plus, Lansbury is the wife of a powerful
senator played by James Gregory, 14 years her senior, but not supposed to be, I
don’t think. Wives of powerful senators should be at least in their 40s, and
more likely in their 50s.
I’d like to be more familiar with the other movies Lansbury
made around this time, to see how commonplace this was for her, but somehow, I
haven’t seen a single Lansbury performance for nearly 20 years on either side
of these two. Blind spots everywhere, I’m ashamed to say.
Well, cinema needs its menacing matrons, and Lansbury did it
very well, whether she was old enough to do so or not.
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