Angela Lansbury (1925-2022)

I don't remember a time in my life before Angela Lansbury.  This might be because there wasn't, actually, a time in my life before Angela Lansbury, and I don't mean this speciously since she's 60 years older than me.  I mean, Lansbury has been a presence in my life since I could form cogent sentences.  There is an amusing video of me at probably the age of about four fighting with my brother Luke.  He couldn't have been more than one, and had the audacity to sit on my yellow blanket while giddily laughing on his chair.  With one swift yank I pulled it out from him, saying "mine" and despite the fact that my dad (apparently the David Attenborough of parental videography) was behind the camera, Luke sat there crying, from what I remember actually falling out of the chair with the move.  I was yelling too, and then suddenly the magical words came from the television screen: "tonight on Murder, She Wrote."  Entranced, the crying & yelling stopped as we both sauntered over to the television.

Murder, She Wrote was and still is, one of my favorite shows, and as a child, I watched it religiously.  Oftentimes, this was in connection with my grandparents.  I remember visiting them on Sunday nights with my dad & brother, and telling my dad when Andy Rooney started to talk on their TV screens (for you young'ens, this was how 60 Minutes used to close), "we have to go-we're going to miss Murder, She Wrote."  I knew well enough that my dad wouldn't let us stay at my grandparents house for the full hour, so given our house was ten minutes across town, we'd miss the crime if we didn't act fast.  I remember my grandmother grinning, knowing that this dance would come to pass every week as she settled in her blue chair, never missing a second of the detective work.  Even when the rest of our family would watch Lois & Clark: The Adventures of Superman (when it went head to head with Murder, She Wrote in the years before DVR or us recording competing shows on our televisions), I stayed in my parents bedroom, watching their tiny 9" television, solving cases with Jessica Fletcher.

It wasn't just Cabot Cove though-Angela found her way into every avenue of my life.  The first VHS tape I owned, which I got for my birthday at the end of a scavenger hunt, was a glossy plastic-ensconced Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which I watched so much I'm surprised it didn't wear out.  After watching Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris while my grandmother babysat me, my brother found a copy of it on eBay as a present for me and it would later become the most prized VHS copy I owned as it became rarer & rarer to find a copy.  I would sit in my brother's room listening to Lansbury's heavenly voice on his copy of the Beauty and the Beast soundtrack, one of my favorite Disney films.  In college, my honors thesis revolved around four movies, including Lansbury's magnum opus The Manchurian Candidate, still one of the greatest film performances, and perhaps the most shameful snub in Oscar's long history (Patty Duke is great, but...there's only one Mrs. John Iselin), though at least Oscar got it right with an Honorary Award eventually (something the Emmys somehow never got around to despite 18 losses for the TV legend).  I got to see Lansbury perform on her true love, the Broadway stage, in one of her final roles in The Best Man with James Earl Jones.  Even today, while I'm writing this, I see my desk lined with her face, every one of the Murder, She Wrote books by Donald Bain proudly situated behind my monitor.

I oftentimes think when an entertainer I genuinely care about dies that it feels indulgent to think of one's self in a time when the loss of a real-life person happens.  After all, it's hard to know what was real and what was felt with an entertainer, who was, of course, playing a part.  But as I got older and my grandmother got frailer, her memory starting to fade, & the person she was when I was a child began to become a memory of a time I would never get back, I was beyond grateful for how much my childhood with her involved Angela Lansbury.  They became so linked, that when my grandmother died two years ago, I rewatched Murder, She Wrote from start to finish as a tribute, remembering comments that my grandmother had made when we'd watched it together when I was young, little asides about Jessica Fletcher & Seth Hazlitt & Amos Tupper.  Lansbury's warmth, her talent & grace were so bright that they became appointment viewing for a midwestern Norwegian grandmother who knew little of pop culture & her beaming grandson who would make it his identity.  Thank you Angela, for your work and your decades of giving entertainment to the world...because of you, I can go to Cabot Cove whenever I need and feel like one of the people I loved most in my childhood is still in a blue rocking chair beside me.