Angela Lansbury, Broadway’s Beloved Everywoman

We know that actors are not their roles, but it still came as a shock to see Angela Lansbury backstage in bunny slippers and a tatty robe, offering visitors a nice hot cuppa.

This was in May 2007, just minutes after she’d finished playing Leona Mullen, a retired tennis player, in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce,” the play that brought her back to Broadway, at age 81, after a 24-year absence. She’d based Mullen in part, she told me secretly, on Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, borrowing her bearing along with the bright red suit.

You’d think that after playing hundreds of characters over a 75-year career, at least some element of some of them would have stuck. But the woman in the slippers and robe was no Cora Hoover Hooper, the cartoon mayoress of “Anyone Can Whistle,” her first stage musical role, in 1964. Nor was she Mame Dennis, the glamorous bohemian she created in the show that made her a Broadway star in 1966. And she was certainly no Nellie Lovett, the human-pie-maker of “Sweeney Todd,” a performance that earned her the fourth of six Tony Awards, in 1979.

These, along with several still to come — the daffy Madame Arcati in “Blithe Spirit” and the imperious Madame Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” not to mention her dozens of movie and television roles from 1944 to 2018 — were, she told me, just “gloves.” She put them on and took them off.

And underneath? “Just a cabbage,” she said. “I absorb everything.”

If Lansbury, who died on Tuesday at 96, was “boring as all get out,” as she later added, that too was a costume, and a tool. The hausfrau disguise permitted all the others, allowing the cabbage to store everything for later use. The corollary was that she needed to play many different kinds of characters, to make the best yield of all she’d observed. Her family said she’d go anywhere for a false nose.

So when she was creating the amoral Lovett in “Sweeney,” she thought back to her childhood in London, and the cheerful, can-do Cockney help in her home. Their attitude turned out to be the key to the comedy: She played the character not as an accessory to murder but as a woman brightly solving problems. (Dead clients at the barbershop upstairs? Not enough meat for her pies downstairs? Bingo!) Far from critiquing her by applying an ironic varnish to the performance, Lansbury dared to advocate for her by making her as clever and merry as possible. The audience could supply the irony.

Hers was a prodigious memory, but to achieve such effects it also took finesse and courage. McNally, the “Deuce” playwright, marveled that “if you say to her, ‘You’re doing 1.3 on that line, can you do 1.4?’ she could do it and you’d see the difference.” Marian Seldes, her co-star, agreed: “She is such a brilliant technician as well as having a pool of emotions she can tap into in a second to show the audience and then take away. The technician is like a great musician: I play this note and then I stop.”

Taste, for Lansbury, was a matter of making the right choices in the right amounts. She disdained acting that depended on personality instead of action, and when I spoke to her at length in 2007, she seemed to connect that to a childhood spent shouldering her mother’s grief after her father died and the Blitz began. She was already independent, unafraid and a problem solver:

“I remember taking the bus home in absolute pitch black, walking up Finchley Road alone, the balloons in the air. It was exciting; anything could happen. The first time the air-raid alarm went off my sister lost it, but I did not. There’s a portion of me that simply doesn’t react to things like this. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.”

That’s how she performed, too, without sentimentality or histrionics. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t stand up for herself and her characters. While working on “Anyone Can Whistle,” she complained to Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the songs, that she didn’t really understand and thus feel comfortable playing the corrupt mayoress: There was “no there there.”

Sondheim didn’t know what to do about that, but when she added that her co-star, Lee Remick, “has five songs while I have four,” he said, “That I can solve.” He immediately wrote “A Parade in Town” for her — a great song that evened the score and not incidentally gave Lansbury a deeper character to play.

In a way, her characters were like her family: People she cared for deeply but recognized as separate beings. She was connected to them through action. It was thus an easy if no less painful decision to drop out of the musical “The Visit” to care for her husband, Peter Shaw, when he became very ill, taking care of him until his death in 2003. “And when I say I took care of him,” she said, with as much overt emotion as I ever heard from her, “I really took care of him.”

That lack of personal neediness made her perhaps the best-loved of all Broadway (and television) stars of her time, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining, in her own deportment, professional, approachable and neatly tucked in. You never felt, as you did with so many divas, the need to feed her ego or point her toward help. Quite the reverse: When she met McNally, drunk at a party in 1981, she told him — “with such love and concern,” as he later recalled — “I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you’re drunk, and it bothers me.” It was the beginning of his sobriety.

Feeling through action was the Lansbury touch, and if it came at some cost to her, it never showed. “She’s very brave,” Seldes told me. “She never wants to be loved; she wants to play the part.”

What showed was the brilliance of her technique, informed by feeling you couldn’t in fact see. Perhaps McNally was thinking of that when he had Seldes’s “Deuce” character say, “People should love what they do,” to which Lansbury provided a sharp correction.

“People should be good at what they do,” she said.