Posted on: Friday, January 30, 2004
Angela Lansbury takes gutsy leap
By Frazier Moore
Associated Press
Angela Lansbury read the script three times while puzzling whether to accept the part of 84-year-old, tough-as-nails Granny in "The Blackwater Lightship."
Then John Erman, the director of this "Hallmark Hall of Fame" production, made his pitch.
"He called me at my house in Ireland, which is where the film is set, while I was standing at my stove," Lansbury recalled with a smile. "He said, 'Angie, if you have the guts, you should do this role.' And I said, 'Well, you know me, and I do have the guts.' "
Granny proved a gutsy leap for the 78-year-old Lansbury, almost unrecognizable in the role's gray, thatchlike wig and dowdy garb.
"The Blackwater Lightship" (airing on CBS at 8 p.m. Wednesday) forces an encounter between three generations of estranged women: Granny, her cold, long-widowed daughter Lily (Dianne Wiest) and brooding granddaughter Helen (Gina McKee).
"I love this triumvirate of women faced with an extraordinary problem in their lives," said Lansbury.
The cause of their fractious reunion: Declan, Helen's brother, who has re-entered their lives in the final stages of AIDS. He wants to spend a bit of his remaining time at Granny's, where two of his close friends show up, further heightening the tension.
Stuck in this emotional traffic jam, the three women must at last confront old hurts and air their old grievances. "This comes after years of thinking they were helping each other by not telling each other things," said Lansbury, "when, as it turns out, that's all the other person was waiting for."
The film was shot in September in Ireland, mostly in a seaside village down the coast from Dublin — a bit north of County Cork, where Lansbury and Peter Shaw, her husband of nearly 60 years, shared a happy retreat over the decades.
This is her first film project since Shaw — a talent agent and studio executive who co-produced Lansbury's long-running series "Murder, She Wrote" — died last February at 84.
"It was a lovely shoot, friendly and warm," said Lansbury, clearly glad she decided to say yes. "And I loved letting my appearance go by the wayside."
On a recent visit to Manhattan from her home in Los Angeles, Lansbury struck quite a different picture from Granny or even Jessica Fletcher, her sensible crime novelist — radiant in a tweed pantsuit as we met for tea.
Never an ingenue or leading lady, Lansbury typically played take-charge types, whether the ribald flapper of Broadway's "Mame" or the power-mad mom in the 1962 thriller "The Manchurian Candidate" in a film career that began with her Oscar-nominated debut as a take-no-guff servant girl in the 1944 classic "Gaslight."
"I was always a good feature character actress," said Lansbury, "and I didn't become a really big star until I did 'Murder, She Wrote' — except on Broadway, of course." Not to mention the four Tonys.
