‘A real subversive, sprightly granny’: working with Angela Lansbury by director Neil Jordan
Ihad two Angelas in my life at one stage. Angela Carter (long gone and greatly missed) and Angela Lansbury (flew out of this world last night, equally greatly missed). There should be a ghost at your elbow, whose only purpose is to remind you how lucky you are.
I would travel over to Clapham Common in south London to work with the first Angela, dissecting her short story collection The Bloody Chamber into interlocking bites and fragments of upended fairy tales that would become The Company of Wolves. I ended up with the second Angela on a sound stage in Shepperton in a forest made of movable trees designed by Anton Furst, financed, somehow, by the producer Stephen Woolley.
She would have been 57 or so at the time, far too sprightly to be a granny … but then we needed a very unusual granny, this being a very unusual film set. There were trees covered in the musculature of humans, glistening with dark, tacky red; there was the root of a massive oak or elm shaped like an elegant high-heel; there were lifesize teddy bears that groped maids of honour; there was an entire wedding party of overdressed wolves (dogs, actually, powdered malamutes); there was a wolf that came out of a huntsman’s mouth.
Then there was Angela herself, her granny head made into a wax model that was lopped off with a poker and broke into plaster shards on the floor. We had crew members who had just come off The Empire Strikes Back and regarded what we were doing with a kind of benign contempt or bemusement. But Angela always understood. Not only understood, but gave them the feeling the enterprise might be worth something in the end. She had been in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, after all.
I saw her years later at a reception in Dublin and was surprised at how moving it was. She finally looked like what she had played so well: a real, subversive, sprightly granny. And I realised I had never really had one, until then.