When I interviewed Dame Angela Lansbury at the end of the 1980s for my biography of Albert Finney, she was remarkably frank about her misgivings about playing Gertrude to Finney’s Hamlet a decade earlier at Peter Hall’s National theatre in the South Bank trailblazer.
“We were really rooted to the ground,” she said. “It was very, very spare. At times, Albert resembled a kind of black-clothed paratrooper, while I felt like a rather roughly hewn chess piece …
“There was no sexuality in the piece at all, which was curious. I felt that one of the reasons that I could be cast in this role effectively was the fact that I had a somewhat shady reputation for playing rather incestuous mothers. Yet I didn’t have a chance to display any of those qualities in the production.
“I simply couldn’t help feeling at the time I was miscast. I had to play her as a rather annoying, puddingy sort of woman and I wasn’t ever comfortable with that.”
Also upset at the time about the recent death of her mother, Lansbury whiled away hours in her theatre dressing room sewing a quilt and scoffing sweets, until one night, Finney came in for a chat. “He took a look at me and said, ‘you do rather like sweeties, don’t you, darling?’ I realised that what he really meant was that I was putting on weight. Which indeed I was. That stopped me in my tracks. I went on a diet and lost 20 pounds.”
