Angela Lansbury's heroic battle against insidious typecasting makes for much of the interesting reading in this authorized biography.
The actress never did become a movie star, but she did all right -- arguably better: She became a Broadway star and a television icon.The book opens with a bang. It's 1968, and Lansbury is at the pinnacle of her acting career, starring as Mame Dennis, the lovable, incongruously glamorous title character of a big and brassy Broadway musical. In her final performance, she once more steps spectacularly down the staircase onstage at New York's Winter Garden Theatre, which has been her professional "center" for two years. The title song -- in which she sings not a note -- brassily drives the lavish production number. "Mame" has liberated her.
By contrast, the book's finale is disappointingly limp, a pastiche of reflections that we've already seen played out by Lansbury in her life and career.
Still, at 73, the English-born Lansbury is known most widely as Jessica Fletcher, the star of the long-running TV series "Murder, She Wrote." As Fletcher, she can reflect on having, of necessity, finally played herself for the first time in her acting career. (The grinding pace of TV series production allows no time for "acting." As in the movies, stars must play themselves, or exaggerated versions thereof.)
As a teenager, Lansbury was an MGM contract player, a movie actress for two decades in what was the heyday of the Hollywood studio system, the system that stereotyped her. Even so, by her late teens she'd received two Academy Award nominations (for "Gaslight" and "The Picture of Dorian Gray").
She couldn't become a movie star because she was typecast as "the other woman." In what was a critically acclaimed high point,"The Manchurian Candidate," arguably her best film, she was the other woman with a Freudian vengeance. Her character didn't even have a name; she was identified only as "Raymond's mother."
So Lansbury was not only professionally but personally liberated by her role as Mame. Coming to America as a refugee from the London Blitz, a 19-year-old virgin, she married an actor who was, unknown to her, a homosexual. At another low point, she was collecting unemployment insurance and appearing in B pictures. Ultimately, she happily remarried and had two children, only to learn that both had drug problems. (They recovered, and the chastened performance Lansbury gave on a Barbara Walters show was one of her best.)
Lansbury eventually learned the hard way about the Catch-22 of becoming a star. She had concentrated on doing character work; what stars do is revel in typecasting, in playing themselves, in stressing their original extroverted personalities. She would always be, in her words, a "one-up," a supporting actor.
When at the age of 41 she was offered "Mame" -- after 23 years as a professional actress, after 36 movies, 26 TV plays, and three Broadway productions -- she became a star. She made people forget even Rosalind Russell's indelible performance in the movie "Auntie Mame." She put into practice her director Gene Saks's counsel: "You must not be afraid to own the stage." Her confidence would propel her into Stephen Sondheim's acclaimed "Sweeney Todd."
The book has a hint of the behind-the-scenes matter that draws us back even to authorized star biographies. Esther Williams had most of her diving done for her by a double named Edith Mottridge, who did the more difficult swimming, too. Katharine Hepburn once remarked of Ingrid Bergman that she was "too stupid to be any good." (Lansbury splits hairs over the remark, saying we should take it to mean that Bergman was just stupid where men were concerned.)