The nature of the Academy Awards is that they are a numbers game. Every year we discuss the snubs as the nominations are announced and then we move into the second phase. That phase is where five nominees become one winner and four losers. This phase is inevitably followed by a chorus of who should have won instead.
As the winners are announced and settle into the potential career-boost and prestige of “Academy Award Winner” there is the secondary class of “Academy Award Nominee” folks. It will go into their obituaries and become emblazoned upon the promotional materials of their ensuing projects. Maybe some of these folks will become an eventual winner, but a certain subset was the eternal bridesmaid.
It is here that I begin my new reoccurring longform: Always the Nominee. I will be spotlighting the actors, actresses, and directors that never won a competitive Oscar but were nominated at least three or more times. I will be focusing in on screen personalities from the Studio Era or the New Hollywood period that have passed. So no, I won’t be doing one of these for Glenn Close, Amy Adams, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sigourney Weaver, Willem Dafoe, Ed Harris, Annette Bening, Ryan Gosling, Yorgos Lanthimos, and any number of other currently living creatives whose work I strongly admire. They still have time and opportunity to win one of these guys outright.
We begin with one of the greatest to ever grace our screens. In a career spanning roughly 80 years, Dame Angela Lansbury appeared on stage, screen, and television in a variety of roles that practically defined “actorly range” for the ages. Musical, drama, horror, comedy, noir, she played in them all. From the likes of Disney to Noël Coward, from MGM to Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury was a chameleonic presence that meant different things to different generations. For me, she was the warm, beloved institution of family-friendly entertainments like Anastasia, Beauty and the Beast, Mrs. Santa Claus, and cameos in the likes of Nanny McPhee and Fantasia 2000.
But then I went back and discovered her earlier work, including in the three films I will be discussing later. She appeared in classics of the studio era like The Court Jester or enjoyable minor works like The Harvey Girls. She had juicy supporting parts in films like Death on the Nile, and appeared in cult classics such as Bedknobs and Broomsticks and The Company of Wolves. Her film career is vast and then we factor in television appearances across the decades, and Lansbury becomes a through line of American popular entertainment from the earliest days of the televised medium and the height of the studio era to the present day.
One of my favorite performances of hers is the filmed stage performance of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, one of her five competitive Tony award wins. The entirety of her talents from a shocking comfort with outré/dark material to musical-comedy is on full display. She worked essentially until the end of her life, and even in her late 80s was still capable of impressive work on stage. (Checkout the Great Performances: Driving Miss Daisy where she acts opposite James Earl Jones and elevates middling material into high art through sheer mutual talent.)
If it seems like she was a thoroughbred born for performing, it is because she was. Born comfortably middle-class to a politician father and a stage actress mother, Lansbury’s gifts were evident from the beginning. Her father died when she was nine, and Lansbury professed to escape and self-educate through books, theater, and the cinema. By the time 1940 came around, Lansbury was studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art.
Of course, with 1940 came the Blitz. Lansbury, her mother, and two younger brothers fled first to Canada before settling in New York. While in New York, she gained a scholarship from the American Theater Wing for the Feagin School of Drama and Radio. She graduated in 1942 and shortly thereafter was appearing onstage with her mother in a Canadian touring production of Tonight at 8:30. By August 1942, her mother had moved to Hollywood in hopes of sustaining a film career and Lansbury followed her out there. (Fun fact: while working at Bullocks Wilshire, Lansbury befriended a group of gay men and started her lifelong advocacy and allyship for the community.)
While her mother, Moyna Macgill, never quite achieved a prominent Hollywood film career, she was largely regulated to small character parts, she did manage to host salons at her house that were attended by the artists, actors, writers, and glitterati of the day. It was at one of these house parties that Macgill and Lansbury met John van Druten, the co-author of the film Gaslight. He went back to director George Cukor and suggested that he audition the neophyte actress for the part.
She appears around the twenty-seven-minute mark as the hired maid for the household. Two things are crystal clear: Lansbury had tremendous self-possession even at this early age, and her knack for character work was already evident. Not only is her voice notedly different, but her body language is slatternly and more mature than her age. While Charles Boyer is the abusive husband slowly driving Ingrid Bergman into a state of paranoia and sexual neurosis, Lansbury buzzes about the sidelines with her Cockney accent and inappropriately flirty demeanor.
Even in her first film role, Lansbury gets a juicy part that is more fun than most leads would be. Gaslight is an Edwardian noir and part of a series of domestic melodramas from the period that found wives at the mercy of their emotionally abusive husbands. Lansbury’s Nancy has the hots for Boyer and a barely concealed disdain for Bergman and her fragile state. She even gets the chance to do a little ditty at one point, however briefly.
In short, yes, it is a fine showcase for the debuting actress. While the part can be reduced down to “venal bitch,” as Lansbury later claimed MGM kept casting her as post-Gaslight, she plays it for all it is worth. And it is worth quite a lot.
Ingrid Bergman is rightly remembered for her tremendous work in the film, but Lansbury manages to hold her own against two cinematic heavyweights at the height of their popularity and prowess. For someone making a debut performance, that is no small feat by itself. We remember her cigarette lighting scene and the one where she does a little Cockney number. We remember her dispassionate treatment of Bergman and lustful glances at Boyer.
Come Oscar nomination morning, Gaslight ranked in a slew of deserved accolades. In addition to nominations for Picture and Adapted Screenplay, it secured three acting nominations (Bergman in Lead Actress, Boyer in Lead Actor, and Lansbury in Supporting Actress). Gaslight’s domestic trauma and petticoated noir largely lost to the feel-good musical-comedy Going My Way, except for Bergman in the first of her three Oscar wins. While Lansbury lost the Oscar that year to a beloved veteran, Ethel Barrymore in None but the Lonely Heart. (She would go on to terrorize Barrymore in 1951’s Kind Lady in another villainous chambermaid role.)
After Gaslight, Lansbury starred as the older sister of Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet, a charming film that demonstrated her still developing range. Even at this earliest point in her career, and with her debut film performance being such a knockout, MGM did not quite know what they had on their hands. They regulated Lansbury to scene-stealing supporting parts, where she often shined, and often cast her as older than her real age. By Lansbury’s own admission, she was never viewed as a potential leading lady by the studio but a character actress they could slot anywhere as needed.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is largely an exercise in frustration as some of the expertly cast roles (George Sanders as Lord Henry Wotton is perfection) butt up against the mandatory Hays Code censorship, and all of it is wrapped up in MGM’s gauzy haze that does not engender the same kind of style or panache as Universal or Paramount did in their contemporaneous horror films. MGM could sell romance, but sex and terror were not their main attractions. Dorian Gray needed more lust and smoke to really sell the atmosphere and theatrics.
Lansbury’s Sibyl Vane is an innocent drawn to Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield) and corrupted then destroyed by his hedonism in the process. We meet her as she sings “Good-Bye, Little Yellow Bird,” one of the earliest instances of her actual vocals being used in a film. Her sweet, tremulous voice should have been a hint to the studio that they had a prospective musical star, an untapped goldmine, just waiting to be developed, but that’s a whole other essay. Even while singing, Lansbury manages to alter her voice to fit the character, and that was why she was one of the greats.
Even better is the vulnerability and sadness she projects after realizing that all Dorian wanted was her sexual innocence. Once he has had his fill of that, he tosses her away. Without saying a word and largely communicating thought and feeling behind her large eyes, Lansbury gives a quietly shattering performance in a handful of quiet, carefully chosen gestures. Once she leaves the film due to an offscreen suicide, Dorian Gray goes largely flat.
Hatfield is not a bad actor by any stretch, but he is stuck with writer/director Albert Lewin’s decision to change the character from a petulant, hungry creature of pure id to a cool, reserved being who merely stares contemptuously out at the world. It strands Hatfield with giving a performance that is a lot of him merely observing things that are happening around him. He, and the film, needed more demonstrative characters and performances to build something off, but aside from Sanders (who is largely underused) and Lansbury, Dorian Gray has a lot of stiff Brits and Reed given little to do aside from look dewy and beautiful until the big reveal of the portrait’s monstrous change and Dorian’s death.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is an all too rare example of a horror film making good at the Oscars. While Lansbury lost her bid to Anne Revere, she played the stalwart and supportive mother of Lansbury and Taylor in National Velvet, the film won for Best Cinematography, Black-and-White and was nominated for Best Art Direction, Black-and-White (losing to Blood on the Sun). That cinematography win was well earned as numerous scenes match the ripe, purplish prose of Oscar Wilde’s source novel, or demonstrate some fine moments of moodiness and tension.
By 1948 MGM was cutting costs and letting numerous stars go. After fulfilling her seven-year contract with the studio, she was let go in 1952. During this period, she was regulated to a lot of B-movies and live television. One wonders what she could have accomplished under a director like Alfred Hitchcock during this period given her range and talent for secretly villainous roles. Alas, one of the great mental “what if” games. I also wonder if she would have done well with Douglas Sirk’s mannerisms during his succession of beautifully ornate 1950s melodramas.
She worked well with Vincente Minnelli, Delbert Mann, Martin Ritt, and was a hoot as Elvis Presley’s mother in Blue Hawaii. Then came her work with John Frankenheimer in All Fall Down as Warren Beatty’s destructive mother. It was while filming this role that Frankenheimer handed her a book and said she might be perfect for a part in his next movie. (A part that Frank Sinatra initially pitched for his close friend, Lucille Ball.)
Typically, thrillers operate on the withholding of information and its steady drip as the audience puts it all together along with their bewildered protagonist. The Manchurian Candidate instead offers up a swirling collage of false memories, revealing dreams, behind the curtain political machinations, and budding realizations that all of these disparate pieces slot together nicely if you step back and take a look at the bigger picture. It is not that we wonder if Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) will commit the murder(s) that he’s been programed to do, but if his former squadmate, Major Marco (Frank Sinatra), can stop him before the carnage happens.
It is a pretty simple setup made all the richer between director John Frankenheimer’s tight control, delirious editing from Ferris Webster, the cinematography from Lionel Lindon, George Axelrod’s perverse screenplay, and, of course, the expert ensemble who uniformly turn in some of their finest work. Sinatra and Harvey are both haunted, damaged men who seem to operate in a perpetually narcotized manner but from two different ends of the spectrum. Harvey is eternally lost in the fog while Sinatra snaps in and out of it while each communicate a terror of the unknown, of the inability to trust their own minds. And props to Janet Leigh for making a bizarro character strangely tender. She often gets lost in the shuffle but her scenes with Sinatra are delicately rendered even as we’re left wondering if she’s some kind of double agent assigned to monitor him or if she really is just some meet cute that pays off for the tortured serviceman.
But we are here to talk about Lansbury, and boy, does she deliver the goods. She preens with an aristocratic condescension and manipulation that would make Mama Rose blush. (Coincidentally, another role she played with aplomb and to critical accolades.) Mrs. Iselin’s power-hungry nature is not immediately evident but quickly reveals itself before showing itself off as one of the main power brokers in this universe. While her senator husband (James Gregory) is a McCarthyite blowhard, a pawn like so many others, Mrs. Iselin is the icy queen who uses her buffoonish husband to distract the media while her vast conspiracy plays out unbeknownst to the common man.
If you only know Lansbury from her late-career sweet old lady phase, then prepare to be wowed by an actress in full control of her craft. This singularly nasty role stands apart from several of her bad girls or helicopter mothers from the sheer artistry she brings to the part. We watch her watch her husband derail a defense department meeting through a TV monitor and she does so with all the enacting eye of a stage mother ready to give pointers and critiques on how to do it better next time.
Perhaps her grandest scene is the revelation of her as the Queen of Diamonds, the identity behind her son’s brainwashing to commit political violence and install her husband (and herself) in the White House then enact martial law. Her escalating fury isn’t the most terrifying thing in this scene, no. it is instead the moment where she blows the lid off the heretofore vaguely incestuous undercurrent in her relationship with her son. She is never scarier than in this moment because we see just how far she will go in her quest for power, and how warped her internal morality truly is.
Naturally, she was nominated come Oscar morning. She had previously won the Golden Globe and National Board of Review, so there was a good chance she might walk away with the Oscar this time around. There was just one little problem: Arthur Penn’s The Miracle Worker. The Academy routinely has a problem awarding villainous women, and the prospect of anointing a new star (Patty Duke) in an extremely likeable role (Helen Keller) was just too much for them to resist. It doesn’t hurt that Duke is really a co-lead, but much like Mary Badham in To Kill a Mockingbird, also nominated that evening, she was regulated to supporting. (It was an unwrriten role for a long time that kids went supporting, no matter what. Case in point: Tatum O'Neal's Oscar winning performance in Paper Moon.)
In fact, The Manchurian Candidate lost both of its nominations (Lawrence of Arabia won editing, and practically everything else that evening), but it has endured through the ages. It prefigured the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, and various other political scandals that have only strengthened a sense of paranoia in this country about those in power and a vast interconnected web to protect/takeover the elites. Even at this time in the early 60s, America seemed primed to feast on itself if given the proper channel for its rages. Time has not diluted its power, satire, or the queasiness that ensues as you ruminate over it long after the last scene has finished.
Weep not for Lansbury, though. While she may not have won the competitive Oscar, the Academy did finally gain some sense and hand over an Honorary Oscar in 2013. I am positive it looked lovely next to her six Tony Awards (five competitive, one lifetime achievement), BAFTA Lifetime Achievement, six Golden Globes, SAG Lifetime Achievement, Olivier Award, National Medal of Arts, Kennedy Center Honor, and various other honors bestowed upon her during her lengthy career. Shame that the Emmys, who nominated her an astounding 18 times, couldn’t be bothered to give her a win or an honorary award. Sometimes these voting bodies are completely asinine in who they overlook and how often.
If you only know Lansbury as the kindly old dame of her
late-period, then these three Oscar nominations are a good primer on not only
her range, but a good demonstration of the times when the Academy actually got
it right and singled out some of the best work in an actor’s career for
serious awards consideration. Even some of her lesser vehicles are worth watching simply to watch
her chew the scenery (The Pirates of Penzance) or bring her tremendous gifts to enjoyable
minor works (State of the Union). If you take anything away from this, it’s the
following two things: 1) I am a big fan of her work as an actress; 2) you
should watch some of her movies.
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