April 29, 2007

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Angela Lansbury at her home in New York . She stars in the new play “Deuce.”

Elegant grandmotherly types wearing gold brooches and kicky boots are not exactly rare birds at the Four Seasons Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, so the young waiters in the lobby restaurant there paid no attention to Angela Lansbury when she showed up for tea one day in February. But a 50-ish woman having lunch at another table certainly did. Between courses, she approached nervously and — perhaps confusing Miss Lansbury with Jessica Fletcher, the amateur detective she played for 12 seasons on “Murder, She Wrote” — immediately started explaining herself. She was on her honeymoon, she said, which is why she was in the hotel, which she couldn’t ordinarily afford because she was a nurse, and wasn’t it funny how life worked out?

Lansbury Returns Miss Lansbury listened indulgently, smiling and cooing and signing her autograph as directed, with best wishes to the happy couple.

“It’s an honor just to hear you laugh,” the fan burbled, stepping away from the table backward, as if leaving royalty.

Miss Lansbury is one of the few actors it makes sense to call beloved. (Science, or at least People magazine, confirmed it in 1994 when she scored a perfect 100 on a “lovability index.”) Whether because of her talent, her endurance or her militant unpretentiousness — what reads as hauteur in other English-born actresses reads in her as hausfrau dignity — audiences and critics have accepted her in all kinds of roles in all mediums at all ages. The number of her major award nominations (three Oscar, 15 Emmy, four Tony) and the number of her wins (zero, zero, four) are perhaps less salient than their range: they cover a 60-year period from 1945 (for her first film, “Gaslight”) to 2005 (for a “Law & Order” guest spot). She has been famous her entire adult life. 

But fame, as the waiters proved, needs constant watering, and Miss Lansbury hasn’t felt up to it lately. Since she withdrew in 2000 from a planned Broadway musical version of “The Visit” to care for her ailing husband, Peter Shaw, her fame has mostly been of the “Will we ever see her again?” variety. And when Mr. Shaw, who was, in essence, Miss Lansbury’s manager, died in 2003, many people, including the actress herself, assumed that the question was answered: No. After 53 years in which her career was something they made together, how could she make it alone? Oh, she might do a cameo or a character part in a television movie, if asked; her family always said she’d travel anywhere to put on a false nose. But the idea of something bigger was almost unthinkable.

And yet the drive that induces a person to make herself famous despite an immense and countervailing modesty (Miss Lansbury calls herself a cabbage: dull but absorbent) is not always diverted by grief, let alone age. At any rate, much to her surprise, she now finds herself, at 81, starring in Terrence McNally’s play “Deuce,” which opens next Sunday at the Music Box. If her return to Broadway has been greeted with rejoicing, it has also occasioned some concern, as when a widow starts dating a man of unknown intentions. Is he good enough for her? Can she stand the possible heartbreak?

Certainly, “Deuce” is no cakewalk like Miss Lansbury’s last Broadway run, a revival of “Mame” in 1983. Mame was a musical role she knew cold, having created it to great acclaim in 1966. “Deuce” is both new and exhausting. For 90 intermissionless minutes, she plays one-half of a retired doubles-tennis pair about to be feted at a U.S. Open championship; they watch a match and open old wounds. Neither Miss Lansbury nor Marian Seldes, who plays her other half, leaves the stage.

“There’s no hiding,” Mr. McNally said. “You’re mercilessly exposed, with no chance to drop your shoulders or blow your nose.” And then there are the 6,000 words of dialogue Miss Lansbury had to memorize.

She could certainly have chosen less demanding material. But insofar as “Deuce” is a play about age and celebrity — “how women become invisible even if they were once huge stars,” Miss Lansbury said — she has the advantage of having studied the matter.

From the beginning of her career she convincingly played roles much older than herself. George Cukor, “appalled that a young woman my age could grasp the character,” Miss Lansbury recalled, cast her as the saucy Cockney maid in “Gaslight” but was forced by the studio to wait until she turned 18 to shoot the scenes in which she smoked. Later, she played a series of mothers whose sons (Elvis Presley in “Blue Hawaii,” Laurence Harvey in “The Manchurian Candidate”) were only marginally her junior. And the whole point of “Murder, She Wrote,” Miss Lansbury said, was to celebrate the kind of active older woman who appeared everywhere in real life yet nowhere on TV.

Playing old, though she resented it at first, was second nature to someone who by her own description had never been young. A happy London childhood among a family of artists and suffragists and Labor firebrands — her mother, Moyna MacGill, was a successful West End actress — was cut short at age 9, when her father died and she became, as she put it, her mother’s “shoulder.” Miss MacGill, whom her daughter unfailingly describes as an Irish beauty, as if she herself were not one, sounds like a handful: feisty, vain, romantic, fun. Tending to her needs — and her younger twin brothers’ — became the template for a role Miss Lansbury would play in permanent rotating repertory.

 “But I didn’t feel that it was a burden at the time,” Miss Lansbury said. “She was dependent, yes, but I was still independent. I was an English schoolgirl who had a whole life of her own and wasn’t involved with her parents to the degree children are today. When World War II broke out in 1939 I remember taking the bus home in absolute pitch black, walking up Finchley Road alone, the balloons in the air. It was exciting; anything could happen. The first time the air-raid alarm went off my sister lost it, but I did not. There’s a portion of me that simply doesn’t react to things like this. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.”

Lansbury Returns It was such a choice that led to her becoming a performer. When her school relocated to the suburbs in order to protect its students from the impending blitz, Miss Lansbury, not wanting to leave her mother alone, decided to audition for the Webber-Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in the West End.

“She tutored me in the balcony scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ ” Miss Lansbury recalled. “I played Juliet, she Romeo. I had no idea what I was saying. I was 13. But I always had a terribly grown-up manner and was very confident, remarkably conscientious. I would do whatever I was asked to the nth degree.”

Five years later, Miss Lansbury was on contract at MGM , once again doing whatever she was asked. If her passivity helped keep her out of the first rank of movie stars, it had the indirect effect of allowing her to work more often over the years in the theater, where she unexpectedly triumphed playing brassy dames with flexible morals like Mame, Mama Rose in “Gypsy” and Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd.” It also allowed her to turn decisively away from work when necessary: when her daughter was sick or when, while she was triumphing in “Mame,” her son slid deeper into serious drug problems. (She moved the family to Ireland.) Though she hated to disappoint the creators of “The Visit,” she didn’t think twice when she had to leave it.

“I took care of my husband until the last two weeks of his life,” she said quietly. “And when I say I took care of him, I really took care of him.”

It was only when there was no one left to take care of that she found herself stymied. It’s not as if she hadn’t thought a lot about death: it was after all the subject of “Murder, She Wrote,” which in its 264 episodes featured 286 homicides. But because the show was a whodunit, the deaths were excuses for unraveling the past, a job always finished in 60 minutes.

For Miss Lansbury, though, the questions are never retrospective; she’s not a detective in that sense. She does not spend much time on such mysteries as why MGM failed to build on her stellar start or why she did not realize her first husband was gay or why, oh why, Lucille Ball got to make the movie of “Mame.” Nor does she ransack her grief for answers: “I don’t, as they say, go there,” she said lightly. The pressing question for Miss Lansbury has never been what you did but what you do next, and because it seemed unanswerable after her husband’s death, she basically froze in place.

“What happens when your family grows up?” she asked rhetorically. “You are a widow, and all they want is to know you’re O.K. My daughter lives nearby, she’s a restaurateur; she would come over every day to do the crossword, but was busy with her work and her own family. I had become a responsibility and I don’t like that feeling. To tell the truth, I was also pretty bored. And a little daunted. People who lose a mate often become sick or die quickly. It took four years, but finally I said I’ve got to take care of myself. I’ve got to make the first move. So I called my business manager and asked, ‘Can I afford a small condo in New York?’”

She could, and one day earlier this month, after previews for “Deuce” had started, she served tea and homemade brownies there. Despite its airshaft views, it is unexpectedly sleek: mod lamps, flat-screen TV, glassy computer nook. It’s as if Jessica Fletcher herself had been murdered.

When she bought the condo, last March, it was not with the intention of returning to the theater, except as a member of the audience. Rather, she hoped to find in New York a bearable distraction from what she had lost. By that she did not mean intimate companionship: “That won’t happen again in my life,” she said. She meant the busy hubbub of culture and politics, cheek by jowl as they had been in her youth. Her home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, though pleasant, was never a place like that, or even a place she’d really chosen: it was a home necessitated by the success of “Murder, She Wrote,” which employed half her family.

“I felt terribly trapped in it for years,” she said, “but couldn’t get out because so many people were depending on me.”

And so, in buying the New York condo, for perhaps the first time in her life she made a decision that considered no one else. And then, a few months later, she read “Deuce” and made another.

“I sent her the script,” Mr. McNally said, “and she called back within 36 hours and said, ‘I want to do it.’ At the time, we were going to produce it at Primary Stages,” a small, subscription-based Off Broadway theater. “I tried to warn her: ‘You know they pay about $400 a week and you’ll be sharing not only a dressing room with Marian Seldes but also a bathroom?’ And she said, ‘Fine.’ But the reality of having Angela Lansbury in a 199-seat theater was preposterous and everyone agreed to do it in a larger venue.”

Lansbury Returns Well, almost everyone. “I had no intention of coming to Broadway,” Miss Lansbury said. “I didn’t really want it. I thought maybe I’d do something with an ensemble; it had been asked if I would consider playing Madame Armfeldt in ‘A Little Night Music’ — well, yes, I would. That would be an interesting kind of character, doesn’t have to hold the whole show. But what I’m doing today, this huge thing, was totally unlooked for. Uncalled for, really. I’m a bit appalled that I find myself in this position.” She laughed to soften the point.

“I’ve had my moments when I’ve said: ‘You fool, you didn’t have to put yourself through it.’ Moments of huge doubt about my ability to do it. But thank God I’m at the stage where I know I can. I take excruciatingly good care of myself. My artificial parts” — she’s had two hips and a knee replaced — “all work. My physical stamina is pretty damn good. Emotional stamina, I have that, too. And once you’ve played to an audience of people who are enormously appreciative the minute you get onstage, that’s a tonic of the first water. What I lack in personal relations at this point, I make up for with a huge public relationship, which is superb.”

Her co-star, Ms. Seldes, agreed. “When the play starts and the lights come up, the sound the audience makes is incredible,” she said. “You can tell who it’s for and also what it means: ‘Oh, you’re here! How wonderful!’”

The reaction is based on more than nostalgia. Miss Lansbury’s unfussy style has often masked the depth of her craft, making her easier to like than performers whose technique is constantly visible. Michael Blakemore, the director of “Deuce,” called her “a star disguised as a character actress” — a kind of chicken-and-egg conundrum. In any case, she has imbued her characters, no matter how perverse or stylized, with great humanity, visible even through the glacial imperturbability of her monsters and the relentless gaiety of her hoydens. That’s because they are all built the same way, from observed behavior — comportment, gesture, inflection, style — that she recombines and pieces together until they fit her, she said, “like a glove.” For Leona Mullen, her character in “Deuce,” she borrowed the traits of — well, she doesn’t want to give it away. But the red suit she wears is a hint.

“The character is all,” she said, “and it’s never me. You take the glove off and leave it in the dressing room.”

But making that distinction has sometimes been difficult to do with Leona, for whom the death of a beloved husband is a major character point.

“In the old days,” Miss Lansbury said, “Peter would always be at the box office, milling around with people in the lobby. He was my ears. Now I come home after a show and nobody’s here to say, ‘What about that audience tonight? Did you see so-and-so?’ I have supper by myself, watch television or not” — she patted the sofa to show where she sits — “and go to bed. That’s my life. It sounds rather dreary. The work, monumental and consuming and pleasurable as it is, has done nothing to my grieving. Not even a distraction, really, except while I’m doing it.”

A big “except,” to look at her onstage, where once again she is the girl in the blackout: unafraid, the world before her, aglow with the knowledge that anything can happen.