Angela Lansbury Visits the Harvard Film Archive on Friday

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to present Angela Lansbury On Screen from Friday November 14 through Sunday November 23, 2014 with Lansbury in person on November 14.

Born to a leading Irish actress and enrolled in schools for drama at a young age, Angela Lansbury (b.1925) was singing in nightclubs at sixteen and had received two Academy Award nominations by twenty, as Ingrid Bergman's shrewdly scheming housemaid in George Cukor's "Gaslight" (1944) and in Albert Lewin's "Picture of Dorian Gray" (1945) playing delicate songstress Sybil Vane. This auspicious inception led not to starring leads, but an MGM contract which conscripted her to, as she put it, "the harpies and the heavies."

With lovely, yet less standard features and a mature demeanor, she was frequently cast in supporting roles as the adulteress, the maid or the mother, and often as a women several years older. By the time of her third Oscar nomination for her chilling performance in "The Manchurian Candidate" (1962), she was playing the mother of Laurence Harvey while only three years his senior. Nevertheless, she resisted typecasting and always brought luminous depth to her character-actor roles. Receiving continual critical notice, Lansbury eventually languished from Hollywood's neglect and finally turned to the theater in the Sixties. Her daring and ingenious character creations and reinventions in productions like "Mame," "Gypsy," "The King & I" and "Sweeney Todd" won her the awards and praise her career in Hollywood always just sidestepped.

Unpredictably, her third act would entail a long stay on television as the Miss Marple-esque Jessica Fletcher in the popular series "Murder, She Wrote," centered around the intelligence and adventurousness of an older, unassuming woman, an achievement still remarkable by the standards of today's television landscape. Lansbury finally received the Oscar she long deserved in 2013 for Lifetime Achievement and was also recently bestowed the title of Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in honor of her seventy-year career as well as her humanitarian work.

The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to welcome Angela Lansbury to discuss her uniquely challenging, ultimately successful journey through stage and screen which she continues to vibrantly pursue to this day.

On Friday, November 14 at 7 p.m., Ms. Lansbury will be present to accompany a screening of "All Fall Down." Lansbury's multidimensional performance in this film guaranteed her fate in John Frankenheimer's following picture, "The Manchurian Candidate," in which she also played a mother with an unnatural fixation on her son. William Inge adapted James Leo Herlihy's novel into the space of an intimately claustrophobic screen and a strikingly naturalistic excursion to a seedy Key West where a small family and a string of lonely women idolize the unusually named Berry-Berry, Warren Beatty's inscrutable manifestation of lost, violent, rebellious youth. Berry-Berry's younger brother endearingly struggles to emerge from his own wholesome innocence while watched over by Karl Malden's well-intentioned, left-leaning, alcoholic father and Angela Lansbury's manically fluctuating, overbearing mother. When the conservatively eccentric clan falls in love with the unique light of visitor Echo OBrien, played with heartbreaking clarity by Eva Marie Saint, everyone attempts to behave. Not entirely unsympathetic, Lansbury remarkably manages to sustain a simultaneous coldness and warmth toward her troubled, unpredictable family, all of whom fall in and out of the apparent roles 50s' society and its cinema has prepared for them.

On Sunday November 23 at 7 p.m. the HFI screens "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami."

Quickly reuniting Lansbury with Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) cohorts Albert Lewin and George Sanders, "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami" is based on Guy de Maupassant's second novel. Sanders plays the ironically-nicknamed scoundrel of the title who becomes bewitched by his own charming powers over women, including Lansbury's youthful widow Clotilde. Aided by a witty, intelligent script, both Lansbury and Sanders evince subtle fluctuations of emotion throughout every shift in their ambiguously unofficial relationship. Although often convincingly sincere, the affections of the manipulative Bel Ami grow increasingly suspect while Clotilde maintains a wry demeanor neither coquettish nor overmodest; she presents a believable independence, devotion and playfulness with the gentle complexity Lansbury would bring to numerous future roles. From the collection of George
Directed by Albert Lewin. With George Sanders, Angela Lansbury, Ann Dvorak

The Harvard Film Archive is located on 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. (617) 495-4700
For more information about these events and the HFI visit the HFI website.