How I will miss Angela Lansbury. Almost 97 years old at her death Tuesday, and the source of so many indelible performances — a body of work that could see you from the cradle (“Beauty and the Beast”) to the end of life (“A Little Night Music”) and even beyond (“Blithe Spirit,” in which she won a Tony for playing an eccentric medium). She left a memorable character at every stage of life, sometimes, indeed, skipping a step forward, as when she played the mother of a man just three years her junior in “The Manchurian Candidate.”
Angela Lansbury could make even murder feel cozy
Of course, her most famous turn was as the novelist-cum-detective Jessica “J.B.” Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote,” the world’s coziest murder-mystery show, which ran from 1984 to 1996. As Fletcher, Lansbury is so effortlessly likable, such a supportive listener and present friend that you can see why everyone is so eager to have her around, even knowing that issuing her an invitation almost certainly means dooming one of your inner circle to death.
People erroneously imagine that the best fantasy is some kind of Carrie Bradshaw scenario where you jet around the globe in expensive shoes having all the sex you can eat. But Jessica Fletcher’s life is much more aspirational: She is a pillar of her Maine community. She has a career she loves. She gets to travel, but she doesn’t have to drive. Jessica Fletcher can wear comfortable sweaters or snazzy suits or chic dresses as the occasion demands.
You underestimate Mrs. Fletcher at your peril, though the cops (frequently, but not always, men) usually do. But then they see her in action, and the results are undeniable. She is unfailingly polite yet unfailingly firm. “Now, just a minute,” she is always saying, and, “Excuse me!” She is always terribly disappointed in the murderer; it breaks her heart to see someone go so bad.
“No one deserves killing!” she shouts in the first episode — and she continues to feel that way even after her hundredth corpse. You would think that after seeing so much carnage, she would be steeled to it, but she never is. Lansbury makes you forget that this is a woman for whom only a week has passed since she was last fishing a body out of a lagoon.
Follow Alexandra Petri‘s opinions
FollowAnyone who spends more than half an hour with me has to sit through a long rant where I pound the table and say, “Imagine! A woman! On the television! Who gets to just be in her 60s and wear cardigans! Do you know how sexy Jessica Fletcher would have to be now, if this show were made today? And she would have trauma!”
In a more just society, all crimes would be solved not by police but by a well-mannered, meddling widow on a bicycle. The authorities could be called in to assist her with the final scene, in which she prompted the murderer to confess in a sudden flash of hubris that technically might not be admissible in a court of law. If I had a dime for every killer who at approximately the 40-minute mark suddenly said, “Yes, all right. I did it!” I could retire now.
And only Lansbury could have sold this ridiculousness. My favorite episode is one in which (I am not making this up) one of the suspicious characters Jessica interviews does such an uncanny vocal impression of the noise made by the house where the murder occurred that she is able to figure out that the killer turned on old pipes that had not been used in some time; this detail lets her nail him. Genuinely, the case hinges on one actor going “scree screeeeeeeee kssss screeee” while Lansbury nods and listens intently.
Unlike Sherlock Holmes, the escapist fantasy of a detective who is so absolutely intelligent that he can be as rude and dismissive of others as he likes, Jessica Fletcher in the hands of Lansbury was the escapist fantasy of a detective so absolutely intelligent that she never had to be rude, ever. It was thrilling to watch a woman get to move through the world the way Jessica Fletcher did, getting the respect she deserved without having to raise her voice.
The few episodes that feature some other sleuth in her place only underscore how essential Lansbury’s unique charm was to making the weekly murders cozy. “What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman,” Lansbury once told the New York Times.
Jessica Fletcher was absolutely that. Around her, people were getting killed with frozen swordfish, or threatened by many varieties of fake ghost, or subjected to mind games by aging playwrights. But Fletcher felt real, and Lansbury made her compellingly so. It was worth the horrible death toll in sleepy Cabot Cove, Maine, to spend time with her every week.
Source: WP
