“I was a good actress and not a pretty face” – Corriere.it

In 2010 Angela Lansbury granted a video interview to the “New York Times”, agreeing that it would only be published after his death. And now that the actress, known to the general public mainly as Jessica Fletcher from the TV show “The Lady in Crime”, has passed away at the age of 96, the American newspaper has published the posthumous film online, a precious document for hear from his words many anecdotes about his life and career.

“I can honestly say, I was a really good actress, I was first of all an actress and not a pretty face – Lansbury begins in the video -. I was mostly a character actor, but the role I wasn’t a character actor in was just that of Jessica Fletcher. Jessica Fletcher was probably the closest thing to a woman I could have been if I hadn’t become an actress. ‘

The story traces his beginnings in the cinema, when he was still a minor with the film “Gaslight” of 1944: «I didn’t really know what I was doing. If about that movie now I’m wondering “how the hell did you get the experience?” I never had a boyfriend, I didn’t know anything, I was only 17. And you see this girl who acts as if she knew a lot, let’s say I could act as if I knew everything ».

Lansbury also speaks of his lovesstarting from the premature first marriage with actor Richard Cromwell, which lasted just a year due to his coming out: “It should never have happened, he had tried to believe it, but it was not possible because he was a gay man and therefore He left. For me it was a terrible shock, as if my life was over ». Then she met Peter Shaw “on a blind date”, a lifelong companion, with whom she had two sons who ended up in the drug spiral: “We didn’t know what to do,” she says, explaining that she and her husband chose to take them to Ireland, starting from scratch.

The actress does not hide the bitterness for the missed Oscar with her role in “The Manchurian Candidate”, “a night that I would not want to relive”, and then arrives at her debut in “The lady in yellow”, a role that makes her enter all houses. Confirmation of not wanting her character to fall in love: «Yes, I refused. I was convinced that if she got into such a mechanism I would immediately destroy Jessica’s charm. She wasn’t a flirtatious one, don’t get me wrong, but I wanted her to feel that sadly circumstances didn’t allow her to happen. ‘