If the criterion is grandness and grandness alone, then the grandest dame of them all was someone like Dame Edith Sitwell, the poet, who back in the 1950s, at the height of her grandness, would intimidate her enemies by regarding them through a pair of lorgnettes. These days, it’s a term generally reserved for elderly female actors – hearty, salty, imperious. Americans can do it, of course – Elaine Stritch, so very great, so very grand – but may struggle to ascend to the highest reaches of haughtiness achieved by a Dame Maggie Smith or a Dame Edith Evans. You can be a national treasure, meanwhile, without being a grande dame (fight me on this, but I’d say Dame Judi falls into this category). Which brings us to Dame Angela Lansbury.
On Tuesday, news broke of her death aged 96, triggering an outpouring of affection and sadness for a cherished figure and one of the last of her generation of performers. Mind-bogglingly, Lansbury started her career in 1944 after moving to the US from Britain during the blitz and landing a role, as a teenager, alongside Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944). That same year, she appeared in the movie Gaslight, with Joseph Cotten and Ingrid Bergman. She was around for the heyday of MGM musicals – I remember as a child seeing her on TV in the 1946 movie The Harvey Girls, alongside Judy Garland, and finding it impossible to connect her with the character from Murder, She Wrote. By the time she played the teapot in Beauty and the Beast in 1991 – at a mere 66 – her longevity alone had already made her beloved.
