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

I had 2 Angelas successful my beingness astatine 1 stage. Angela Carter (long gone and greatly missed) and Angela Lansbury (flew retired of this satellite past night, arsenic greatly missed). There should beryllium a shade astatine your elbow, whose lone intent is to punctual you however fortunate you are.

I would question implicit to Clapham Common successful southbound London to enactment with the archetypal Angela, dissecting her abbreviated communicative postulation The Bloody Chamber into interlocking bites and fragments of upended fairy tales that would go The Company of Wolves. I ended up with the 2nd Angela connected a dependable signifier successful Shepperton successful a wood made of movable trees designed by Anton Furst, financed, somehow, by the shaper Stephen Woolley.

She would person been 57 oregon truthful astatine the time, acold excessively sprightly to beryllium a granny … but past we needed a precise antithetic granny, this being a precise antithetic movie set. There were trees covered successful the musculature of humans, glistening with dark, tacky red; determination was the basal of a monolithic oak oregon elm shaped similar an elegant high-heel; determination were lifesize teddy bears that groped maids of honour; determination was an full wedding enactment of overdressed wolves (dogs, actually, 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 into a wax exemplary that was lopped disconnected with a poker and broke into plaster shards connected the floor. We had unit members who had conscionable travel disconnected The Empire Strikes Back and regarded what we were doing with a benignant of benign contempt oregon bemusement. But Angela ever understood. Not lone understood, but gave them the feeling the endeavor mightiness beryllium worthy thing successful the end. She had been successful Bedknobs and Broomsticks, aft all.

I saw her years aboriginal astatine a reception successful Dublin and was amazed astatine however moving it was. She yet looked similar what she had played truthful well: a real, subversive, sprightly granny. And I realised I had ne'er truly had one, until then.