Finest hours: Angela Lansbury in The Manchurian Candidate

In The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a 36-year-old Angela Lansbury played the mother of a 33-year-old Laurence Harvey. On paper, it sounds ridiculous. In the film, you don’t even think about it. Thus was the power of Lansbury, an actor who could add decades to her appearance without prosthetics. Beyond smart but subtle make-up and lighting, it was all in her gait, her posture, her world-weary demeanour.

She is Eleanor, a secret Soviet asset who’s married to an aspiring US vice-presidential nominee, Johnny (James Gregory). Laurence Harvey is Raymond, an army veteran and unwitting sleeper agent, who’s been brainwashed by Eleanor’s superiors into being a human machine gun for her to target at the regime’s enemies. He retains no memory of the murders he commits.

Eleanor is a monstrous creation, and a deft one. In Lansbury’s hands, she’s a fervent believer in her malevolent cause, who enjoys playacting as any woman exasperated by her silly spouse or her misbehaving child. “You know my whole life is devoted to helping you and Johnny – my boys! My two little boys!” she says early on, to an aggrieved Raymond. Lansbury gives Eleanor’s pretence of being a subservient wife-and-mother a winking cartoonishness. She’s well aware the costume doesn’t fit, but it tickles her to try it on for size anyway.

Although what Eleanor does to her son is horrific, she’s afforded a sliver of pathos. Briefing Raymond in his apparently hypnotised state before his final mission, she expresses her regret at the nightmarish position in which he’s been placed by those above her in the chain of command: “You must believe I did not know it would be you.” We never think for one instant that she’ll step in and prevent her son being a martyr to her cause, but this fleeting flicker of sadness reads as genuine. Eleanor could so easily have been a flatly evil character, but Lansbury gifts her mesmeric, unnerving texture.  

Only in her mid-thirties, she’d already become adept at portraying unhappy, isolated wives and middle-aged women by the time The Manchurian Candidate came along – none quite so unsympathetic as Eleanor, however.

In If Winter Comes (1947), she was Mabel, the wife of Walter Pidgeon’s Mark (Pidgeon was 28 years her senior).  Aware that Mark’s heart lies elsewhere, she vindictively sets in motion a string of events that leads to the death of an innocent woman. Nevertheless, Lansbury makes her character’s pain so achingly tangible, it’s difficult to resent her.

Just months before The Manchurian Candidate was released, Lansbury had appeared in All Fall Down (1962), as the middle-aged mother of a cruel son (Warren Beatty – only 12 years her junior). Though her overbearing parenting is implied to be at least a little to blame for her son’s wantonness, Lansbury plays her with enough nuance and vulnerability to paint a more complicated picture.

And the following year, In the Cool of the Day (1963) saw her as another dissatisfied wife. Sybil’s personal misery and hatred of her husband Murray (Peter Finch) mean his life is almost unbearable. When we learn it stems from her anger over his role in the death of their young child, her attitude becomes a lot more understandable. While middle-aged Murray falls for the uncomplicated young Christine (Jane Fonda), Lansbury makes Sybil the movie’s most interesting character; her fragile, prickly, mordant humour as she comes to terms with her anger, and pursues an infidelity of her own, giving an otherwise forgettable film a stubbornly resilient spark of life.

Ironically, as Lansbury became the age of the women she’d been embodying since her early twenties, her roles got softer, less complex. Whether as kindly amateur witch Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), mystery-writing amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote (1984-1996), or the voice of ceramic housekeeper Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast (1991), she became a cuddly figure, lacking the sharpness that characterised her prematurely middle-aged creations.  

It was a testament to Lansbury’s formidable versatility that she could embody not just ages far removed from her own, but divergent sides of the moral spectrum with utter conviction. After all, who else could lay claim to so indelibly portraying both a woman willing to give the life of her son to overthrow the US government, and a friendly housekeeping teapot?