Angela Lansbury interview with Barbara Walters (1985)

[Music] [Applause] good evening and welcome to our holiday special tonight we have three people for whom 1985 was a very good year three people who in spite of having been down have never been out three people who have come back with three of this year's hottest television shows sybil shepard appeared in a remake of the hitchcock classic the lady vanishes with angela lansbury but then again almost every actor and actress in hollywood has shared the screen with angela harriman's herbal as drunk by a million mexicans she averaged more than a movie a year since she started in films in 1944 but angela lansbury's name never topped the marquee i've just spent an unforgettable four years here in bavaria and now i'm going back to england case in point did you remember that angela lansbury played elizabeth taylor's older sister in national velvet you're too young to understand something have you ever really felt keen about anything oh yes horses oh shoot or that she was ingrid bergman's maid in gaslight that was angela's first movie what do you want out of ned trent in the harvey girls she played the villainous saloon girl opposite the virtuous judy garland if you meant anything to him he wouldn't have sent the judge over to tell you that trent can talk for himself never mind matthews you can't have that mr hardy labor's a whole must make those appointments she was promoted to newspaper publisher for the film state of the union the film co-starred angela lansbury but it starred catherine hepburn and spencer tracy often her directors were even more famous than she it was cecil b demille who speared her to the wall in samson and delilah [Music] but make no mistake angela didn't play delilah because angela lansbury almost always lost her man i'll pick you up pick her up by the 1960s angela's cameo roles had grown older she played elvis presley's mother in blue hawaii i guess we'll be arriving soon we're having cocktails at seven and dinner at eight but angela was used to being cast for older parts at one point she even played lawrence harvey's mother while in truth she was only three years his senior she got three oscar nominations along the way playing mothers matrons maids madams and moguls but her success story really happened on broadway with her smash performance in maine she won the first of her four tonys for best performance in a musical for maim the original was in 1966. still on broadway 13 years later came her next major success in the barber of fleet street musical sweeney todd [Music] but amazingly enough at age 60 after 40 years in the business 50 motion pictures and 15 broadway plays angela lansbury has found her biggest audience ever on television as jessica fletcher in murder she wrote she's no longer a character actress she's a star [Music] off-camera angela lansbury is as much of a success story as on she's been married to the same man for 36 years her husband peter shaw an ex-agent and ex-studio executive is her business partner angela loves cooking and gardening and the only trouble with acting she says is having to leave home to do it but having 40 million new television fans is worth it this wonderful new success can you believe it has it sunk in yet truthfully uh it hasn't you know it's it hits me sometimes i i'm caught up short i think this is expression by it it's pretty boggling i mean i've worked much harder on a character in the theater than i do playing jessica because jessica's very close to home for me because she's just an easy woman she's an easy going woman i don't mean it the way it might sound but you know what i'm saying um it's just that i can relate to her of course for so many years you played women so much older than yourself did you mind uh yeah i didn't mind i think more than i ever let on i covered it up with a sort of professional bravado and you know just wasn't going to let it get me down that's i i i think i sensed in my heart of hearts that my opportunity was going to come that i was going to get a chance to show what i could really do but did you want to be the lovely ingenue getting the man in the movies instead of always being the one he left you bet i did i i you know i desperately wanted to look like the girls who sat at the makeup tables next to me in mgm and i envied them was the ingenue treated differently than the characters yeah yeah she had a better dressing room than i did things like that silly those things really rankle with you you know when you're young gosh how come she gets to have this and i don't you know got to play with all the handsome young guys who were on the lot like peter lawford you know and uh frank sinatra and they would say oh hello angela yeah they kind of oh yeah hi there yes oh hello yes i was never part of it enough don't don't don't know that's all right i had my moments i had you know i got out and about don't worry gee i got married when i was 18. i i know that well you've been married for so long the second husband the first husband was only nine months nine months did you learn enough from those nine months to make the next marriage last how long is it now 36 30 66 going on 37 i mean that's phenomenal and especially in hollywood um yeah it is yes i think i learned yes i think i i did it's better much better the second time around i think how come you don't get bored with each other because i think that we uh or at least i understand because being a woman i think i understand the necessity that marriage really has to be worked at all the time you cannot assume or take anything for granted in a marriage ever did you ever get a crush on any of the leading men no one always had a sight crush you know but you never got carried away i never got carried away no i never got carried away but um when i was very young it was hard not to anyone you'd like to tell us well like john hodiak i always remember in the harvey girls i thought he was pretty spiffy you know did he think he was spiffy not at all no no no he had his eye on anne baxter you know there was always somebody else in the picture always a bridesmaid always a bride yes yes then after years and years of doing films there was name and you singing and dancing and everybody discovering you and and i remember rex reed saying the caterpillar turned into a butterfly were you as amazed as they all were yes i was oh yes and no i i kind of i mean i i certainly wasn't prepared for the reaction but i i knew that i could do it i just knew i could do it to make it happen it took me more persuasion and more time and and more well humbling myself really to get that part so one time in my career that i've done that and i did it for maine because i knew mame was the key that would unlock a whole new career for me and get me out of this kind of doldrums of cameo parts that i was locked into for so many years how did you know i just knew in my heart of hearts i my imagination just contained this picture of myself being able to do this to be able to perform to be able to take stage to be able to command an audience to be able to sing to be able to dance have you ever done it no would you rather do stage than do films or television i would rather do if you wanted to ask me how i wanted to go out and really enjoy myself as an actress yes i have to i have to say the theater there's no question isn't it the toughest uh yes but then uh your your you're doing what hopefully you do best and you're getting immediate response you're getting you're getting an audience it's telling you if they're having a good time if they're listening if they're not they're coughing and they're shuffling and they're eating candies and all the rest of it and if they're not and if the place is quiet and the lights are out and that spotlight is on you it's the most thrilling feeling in the world it's the most powerful feeling that you can possibly have and it's heady stuff it's quite intoxicating and yet i read and you did a lengthy interview sometime back and you said there are times when i'm on that stage when i say to myself what the hell am i doing here i really want to go home well you talk about split personality i have a very split i'm very split because i really love the work of the theater and of acting but i also love my family and my home very often when i do interviews i say what was the best time of your life and what was the worst time of your life i almost don't have to say to you what was the worst time of your life because you had one year in which just everything fell apart and where the actress and the mother were both solely tested yes can you tell us well you know i i think our family life took the route that a lot of families share with me in the in the late 1960s my children grew up they weren't that old they were only 12 13 14 years old and we lived in malibu as you know you had a son and a daughter i have two sons i have a stepson david and my own son anthony and my daughter deirdre david was all right he was a little older he was nine years older than them and he managed to circumvent the drug years they unfortunately did fall by the wayside and they got into drugs hard drugs and most of the kids in malibu did they weren't alone and our next-door neighbor and my son's best friend was unfortunately a victim of that period and died and my son was on the way to doing the same thing there's no question about it heroin heroin yes heroin acid you name it they did it the lot and uh in those days it was you didn't talk about it it was a terrible family skeleton that you kept in the closet we were the generation of parents who had to um face it first without any help except from doctors friends and the advice that we got was really not very helpful so i just didn't know what to do and peter didn't know what to do and finally i think a wonderful thing happened this so well now though yes so well now think of that um you say that a wonderful thing happened but as i remember in the midst of all that your house burnt down that that seems to be a horrible thing well that turned um oddly enough turned out to to be the thing that opened the door to a solution in my mind our lovely house in malibu which we'd lived in for 10 years had was just raised by one of the big fires in 1970 i said to peter look let me go to ireland and let me find a house for us and perhaps if we totally change our way of life and we go back to basics and i'm there and they're with me and you come when you can but let me get them out of here let us get them out of here so ireland represented a sort of oasis in the desert a clean place a place that drugs had not reached so i went to ireland and my son anthony said can i come with you and i said yes but let me go first and establish a beach head and he my peter put him on a plane and he came to ireland and uh he was literally taken off practically on a stretcher i never forget it was very interesting incredible experience for him and for me it didn't matter we were safe we were on safe ground and uh for the first time after a period of four months this boy was clean and of course it was a revelation to see him that way and it was extraordinary and and the kids were fine the the the kids the kids it worked what was the most important thing perhaps that you and peter learned about your family about the kids about this to be there to be there just just to be there just to back up just just try to for us not to fall apart all it means is that the whole fabric of the family isn't broken apart and in the long run that is better because if the child can beat it they will know that the family is ready to take them back and accept them when they're ready because they are the only ones who can do it did you ever feel guilty that when all of this was happening you were on broadway that is you were working of course oh god yes and in fact you see some of the greatest triumph songs in the theater were accompanied by the most horrendous personal things going on back behind the scenes this mask we put on when we go out there is a mask and we are mummers and performers you know we we put on this air of being happy and carefree and gay and of course we have this other river of emotion that is running through our lives all the time which has to do with our our our families our children our husbands their health what is happening to them how they react they have to deal with the success of the the person who's up there all the time and it's it makes life for them much more difficult where were you at this point in your life at an interesting stage really um with a television series that i find artistically it does not challenge me but it gives me a personal sense of achievement as a performer that i have never known before where i go from here i don't know i really don't know i will always go on working i know that you once called yourself a rare bird you said i was and i am remember yes i am rare by dint of the talent that was given to me that's all and i think those of us who are who are the receivers of talent and we must use it we must not waste it we mustn't fritter it away and we mustn't mishandle it if we can possibly avoid it as i don't take credit for what i do i think of it as a god-given talent

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Length: 17min 1sec (1021 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 02 2020