page_title: Angela Lansbury
section_title: The Manchurian Candidate and minor roles: 1952–1965
hierarchical_section_title: Angela Lansbury / Mid-career / The Manchurian Candidate and minor roles: 1952–1965
caption_attribution_description: Angela Lansbury, three-quarter length portrait, seated with daughter Deidre and son Anthony / World Telegram &amp; Sun photo by Roger Higgins.
context_page_description: Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE is a British-Irish American actress who has appeared in a great number of theater, television, and film roles. Her career has spanned almost eight decades, much of it in the United States. Her work has received international attention. She is recognised as the earliest surviving Academy Award nominee and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.
  Lansbury was born to Irish actress Moyna Macgill and British politician Edgar Lansbury, an upper-middle-class family in Regent's Park, central London. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States with her mother and two brothers, and she studied acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in eleven further films for MGM, mostly in supporting roles such as National Velvet, and The Harvey Girls. After her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances.
context_section_description: Unhappy with the roles she was being given by MGM, Lansbury instructed her manager, Harry Friedman of MCA Inc., to terminate her contract in 1952, in the same year that her son Anthony was born. Soon after the birth, she joined the East Coast touring productions of two former-Broadway plays: Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse's Remains to be Seen and Louis Verneuil's Affairs of State. Biographer Margaret Bonanno later stated that at this point, Lansbury's career had "hit an all-time low,"
  In April 1953, her daughter Deirdre Angela Shaw was born. Shaw had a son by a previous marriage, David, and after gaining legal custody of the boy in 1953, brought him to California to live with the family; with three children to raise, the Shaws moved to a larger house on San Vincente Boulevard in Santa Monica. However, Lansbury did not feel entirely comfortable in the Hollywood social scene, later asserting that as a result of her British roots, "in Hollywood, I always felt like a stranger in a strange land." In 1959, the family moved to Malibu, settling into a house on the Pacific Coast Highway that had been designed by Aaron Green; there, she and Peter escaped the Hollywood scene, and were able to send their children to a local public school.
  Returning to cinema as a freelance actress, Lansbury found herself typecast as women older (sometimes far older) than herself in many films in which she appeared during this period. As she later stated, "Hollywood made me old before my time," noting that in her twenties she was receiving fan mail from people who believed her to be in her forties. She obtained minor roles in the  films A Life at Stake (1954), A Lawless Street (1955) and The Purple Mask (1955), later describing the last as "the worst movie I ever made." She played Princess Gwendolyn in the comedy film The Court Jester (1956), before taking on the role of a wife who kills her husband in Please Murder Me (1956). From there she appeared as Minnie Littlejohn in The Long Hot Summer (1958), and as Mabel Claremont in The Reluctant Debutante (1958), which she filmed in Paris. Biographer Martin Gottfried said that it was these latter two cinematic appearances which restored Lansbury's status as an "A-picture actress". Throughout this period, she continued making appearances on television, starring in episodes of Revlon Mirror Theatre, Ford Theatre and The George Gobel Show, and became a regular on game show Pantomime Quiz.
  In April 1957 she debuted on Broadway at the Henry Miller Theatre in Hotel Paradiso, a French burlesque set in Paris, directed by Peter Glenville. The play only ran for 15 weeks, although she earned good reviews for her role as "Marcel Cat". She later stated that had she not appeared in the play, her "whole career would have fizzled out." She followed this with an appearance in 1960s Broadway performance of A Taste of Honey at the Lyceum Theatre, directed by Tony Richardson and George Devine. Lansbury played Helen, the boorish, verbally abusive, otherwise absentee mother of Josephine (played by Joan Plowright, only four years Lansbury's junior), remarking that she gained "a great deal of satisfaction" from the role. During the show's run, Lansbury developed a friendship with Plowright, as well as with Plowright's lover and future husband, Laurence Olivier. It was from Lansbury's rented flat on East 97th Street that Plowright and Olivier eloped to be married.
  After a well-reviewed appearance in Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959) – for which she had filmed in Sydney, Australia – and a minor role in A Breath of Scandal (1960), she appeared in 1961's Blue Hawaii as an overbearing mother, whose son was played by Elvis Presley. Acknowledging that the film was of poor quality, she commented that she agreed to appear in it because "I was desperate."
  Her rare sympathetic role as Mavis in The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960) drew critical acclaim, as did her performances as sinister characters in All Fall Down (1962), as a manipulative, destructive mother,  and the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as the sch
caption: Lansbury with her children in 1957
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