‘A real subversive, sprightly granny’: working with Angela Lansbury by director Neil Jordan



Angela Lansbury with Sarah Patterson successful The Company of Wolves, directed with the assistance of Neil Jordan. Photograph: ITC/AllstarAngela Lansbury with Sarah Patterson successful The Company of Wolves, directed done Neil Jordan. Photograph: ITC/Allstar

The movie-maker formed Lansbury successful his idiosyncratic fearfulness folks-story The Company of Wolves, released successful 1984. Here helium recalls an histrion who ‘usually understood’

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I had Angelas successful my lifestyles astatine 1 stage. Angela Carter (lengthy gone and greatly overlooked) and Angela Lansbury (flew retired of this satellite eventual nighttime time, likewise greatly overlooked). There should beryllium a shade astatine your elbow, whose handiest origin is to punctual you the mode fortunate you are.

I could travel implicit to Clapham Common successful southbound London to paintings with the archetypal Angela, dissecting her abbreviated communicative bid The Bloody Chamber into interlocking bites and fragments of upended fairy memories that could crook retired to beryllium The Company of Wolves. I ended up with the 2nd 1 Angela connected a valid grade successful Shepperton successful a wooded country fabricated from movable bushes desed by mode of Anton Furst, financed, 1 mode oregon the other, done the shaper Stephen Woolley.

She mightiness had been 50 7 oregon truthful connected the time, a ways excessively sprightly to beryllium a granny … but past we wanted a wholly uncommon granny, this being a precise uncommon movie set. There were trees blanketed successful the musculature of quality beings, glistening with dark, cheesy pink; determination has been the ground of a large o.K.Or elm fashioned similar an fashionable excessive-heel; determination were lifesize teddy bears that groped maids of honour; determination was an full wedding solemnisation of overdressed wolves (dogs, definitely, powdered malamutes); determination was a wolf that came retired of a huntsman’s mouth.

Subversive … Lansbury successful The Company of Wolves. Photograph: ITV/REX/Shutterstock

Then determination was Angela herself, her granny caput made close into a wax mentation that became lopped disconnected with a poker and broke into plaster shards astatine the ground. We had radical members who had conscionable travel disconnected The Empire Strikes Back and appeared what we had been doing with a benignant of ben contempt oregon bemusement. But Angela perpetually understood. Not lone understood, nevertheless gave them the sensation the corp is astir apt worthy immoderate happening successful the agelong run. She person been successful Bedknobs and Broomsticks, successful immoderate case.

I noticed her years aboriginal astatine a reception successful Dublin and go amazed astatine however moving it turned into. She yet looked similar what she had performed truthful well: a actual, subversive, sprightly granny. And I realised I had by nary means truely had one, till then.