|
Angela
Lansbury first made her mark on the big screen, where she
mainly played women ten to twenty years her senior. Aside from a
small amount of classical stage work in London prior to hitting the
big screen, Lansbury made her Broadway debut as Cora Hoover Hooper, the
corrupt Mayoress of a bankrupt town, in Stephen Sondheim's short-lived
flop Anyone Can Whistle (1964). Luckily for her, the very
next season Jerry Herman decided to cast her in the title role of his
musical Mame (1965), for which she won her first of four
Tony Awards. She also won Tony Awards for her intense Rose in Gypsy
(1974) as well as for the role that many consider to be her greatest
performance: as Mrs. Lovett,
an amoral baker of meat pies, in Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street (1979). No stranger to flops, either,
she won her second Tony as a Musical Madwoman of Chaillot in Jerry
Herman's Dear World (1969). She closed out-of-town in
Boston, playing the lead in Jule Styne and Bob Merrill's Prettybelle
(1971), an alcoholic Southern Belle who allows herself to be
"therapeutically raped" by members of the minority groups that
her bigoted late husband had discriminated against, singing showstoppers
like "When I'm Drunk I'm Beautiful" and "Manic Deprissives
Don't Do Rewrites." |
