Happy Birthday Angela Lansbury: A look at her first film, ‘Gaslight’

Today marks Angela Lansbury’s 90th birthday. Born on Oct. 16, 1925 in London, Lansbury is one of the greatest actresses to appear on the stage, big screen and television.

Lansbury means different things to different generations. For some, she is the evil third wheel, looking for a way to break in on our movie heroine’s bliss. If you grew up in the 1970s, she was the star of Gypsy on Broadway and Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Anyone watching TV during the ‘80s and ‘90s couldn’t avoid her on Murder, She Wrote. And even today, she remains a towering figure and has yet to stop acting on the stage.

In 1944, at age 18, Lansbury made her film debut in MGM’s film adaptation of Gaslight, a play by Patrick Hamilton. The film is one of the rare dark movies in director GEorge Cukor’s career, alongside his only foray into noir, A Double Life (1947). It is not, by any stretch, a golden Hollywood classic, but it is a fine film and it’s easy to see why Lansbury stood out.

Ingrid Bergman plays Paula, the typical Ingrid Bergman role - a woman tortured throughout the film’s entire duration. Paula returns to London with her new husband, Gregory (Charles Boyer), and they move into a house her long-dead aunt left her. She is spooked by the place, and when she starts hearing noises from above, Gregory begins to convince Paula that she is going mad.

Of course, this is all actually a ruse. Gregory is searching for something in her aunt’s attic. I won’t tell you how it turns out or who he really is... you will have to see the movie to find out.

Lansbury slides into the film as young maid Nancy, a role that earned her her very first Oscar nomination. It isn’t actually a big role and she doesn’t come into the film until late, but she leaves an incredible impact. She helps Gregory keep his ruse going and drives Paula further to the edge of insanity.

This was the first of two small roles that earned her Oscar attention early in her career. She earned another nomination for The Picture of Dorian Gray and is on screen even less in that movie. But it just goes to show how she could leave an incredible impression on audiences and critics. You always want to know what her characters are thinking and Lansbury has a way of commanding attention.

Gaslight is at least filled with other performances that make it worthwhile. After all, Ingrid Bergman won her first Best Actress Oscar for the film. Joseph Cotten also stars in the second half as the police detective who starts catching onto Gregory. The weak point of the film is Boyer, who is a bit hard to take as a manipulative, evil man with that French accent of his.

(I strongly recommend checking out the U.K. 1940 version with Anton Walbrook as Gregory. It’s a much more frightening film and pops up on TCM from time to time.)

Gaslight helped launch Lansbury’s career at MGM, where she was stuck playing supporting parts for far too long. (She’s even in National Velvet!) Eventually, she got away from the studio and went to star in some fantastic films (oh, she is good in The Manchurian Candidate). While she hasn’t made a movie in awhile and did recently receive an honorary Oscar, let’s hope she can get another juicy role on the big screen.