Angela Lansbury is a bad, bad girl
- Susan King
- Jun 20
- 3 min read
Updated: Jun 25
by Susan King
When Angela Lansbury was good, she was very good. But when she bad, she was wonderful!
Long before she became a five-time competitive Tony Award-winner, everyone’s favorite mystery writer/sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS’ 1984-86 series “Murder, She Wrote” and the voice of the doting teapot Mrs. Potts who introduced the Oscar-winning tune “Beauty and the Beast” in the 1991 animated classic, Lansbury excelled in playing manipulative, cruel and often ruthless women.
Including in the low-budget 1955 noir “A Life at Stake.” The tawdry tag line says it all- “Their stolen moments of ecstasy got them in deeper and deeper.”
Film Masters has restored the film and is releasing it on a new Blu-Ray this summer. Though not a memorable film, it’s a lot of fun and Lansbury seems to be relishing her sexy starring role—she even rocks a bathing suit in one scene-—in this “B” movie.
Buffed stud muffin de jour Keith Andes, who is often shirtless, plays a down-on-his luck L.A architect and builder who gets a deal he can’t refuse from an alluring married woman (Lansbury), a former real-estate broker. The deal is her rich sleazy husband (Douglas Dumbrille, who was 36 years older than Lansbury) will buy property, and Andes will build the homes which Angie will sell.
Sounds perfect.
But Lansbury also has grand designs on Andes and his perfect muscular chest. The two soon become entwined in an affair. The affair is so hot and heavy, Andes is slow to figure out his life may be in danger when he is asked to purchase a life insurance policy on himself for $175,000. Lansbury, though, isn’t quite the typical femme fatale because she begins to have feelings for the beefcake.
Glenn Erickson of Trailers from Hell writes: “Lansbury is the seductive ‘motivator’ with a preference for late-night rendezvous in the high mountains where everything is a long drop, nudge nudge wink win. She makes with the hotcha come-ons, but rugged Keith Andes is the one who goes around topless for an entire reel.”
Cinema Retro’s Darren Allison adds: ‘”A Life at Stake’ is a brilliant slice of entertainment which is more than capable of standing on its own two feet. Lansbury really shines and makes for a wonderfully devious femme fatale—who would have thought it?”
Lansbury had been making movies for over a decade when she starred in “A Life at Stake.”
At the outbreak of World War II in England in 1940, Lansbury, her twin brothers and their mother, actress Moyna Macgill, left Britain moving initially to New York before settling in Hollywood. She was all of 17 when she began work on her first film, the 1944 thriller “Gaslight,” for which Ingrid Bergman won her first Oscar. The film also starred Charles Boyer, Joseph Cotton and was directed by George Cukor.
Lansbury told me in a 2013 L.A. Times chat, she was introduced to MGM by a young friend of hers who was in consideration for a role in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” The studio’s cast director told her friend they were looking for an actress to play the devious, flirtatious Cockney maid in “Gaslight.” “He told him about this young girl who had just come from England and had been training to be an actress and maybe he would like to see her,” Lansbury said.
He did.
She tested not only for “Gaslight” but also for “Dorian Gray.” She got both parts and would be Oscar-nominated for both.
With the two Oscar nominations for supporting actress, MGM just didn’t know what to do with her. “I was villainous, or a rather distasteful woman, the unpleasant wife. I was a character actress at a very young age, and I simply adapted myself to the requirements of the role. That’s what actors do.”
Perhaps her best-known role, for which she earned her third Oscar nomination, is the merciless, coldblooded Eleanor Iselin in John Frankenheimer’s 1962 “The Manchurian Candidate.” The wife of a weak-willed senator, Eleanor is in cahoots with the Communists to overthrow the government and uses her son (Laurence Harvey), whom the Commies have brainwashed to become a political assassin, to help her dream come true.
Lansbury noted she had just finished work on Frankenheimer’s 1962’s “All Fall Down,” in which she played Warren Beatty’s mom. “On the last day of dubbing, he slapped this book on the table next to me and said, ‘Your next role is in this book,’” Lansbury recalled. “I don’t know how he knew, but he knew I could pull that one off.”
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