Perspective | Angela Lansbury’s success was no mystery: She owned every stage

I’m sure many British subjects felt the same about their queen, that the universe might intervene and just allow her to go on and on. That was my selfish wish for Lansbury. Not only had she been Angela Lansbury for so long, but she was also — always — the best Angela Lansbury any audience could hope for.

Whether a role called for grit or grace, pluck or poise, Lansbury could summon qualities that led a show past exceptional and all the way to unforgettable. For me, she is forever the pragmatically homicidal pastry chef of “Sweeney Todd,” madly baking into meat pies the tonsorial customers dispatched by Len Cariou’s wild-eyed Sweeney, in the original 1979 Broadway incarnation of the musical by Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler.

It is, simply, one of my all-time favorite performances, an impeccable turn frozen in memory: monstrous and yet hilarious, flirtatious and still heartbreaking. She is rightly hailed for Mrs. Lovett’s priceless introductory song, “The Worst Pies in London”: “Is that just disgusting?/ You have to concede it/ It’s nothing but crusting/ Here, drink this, you’ll need it!”

But it is an image in the musical’s final minutes that has haunted me across the decades: A panicky Mrs. Lovett being waltzed maniacally by Sweeney into fiery oblivion, after he discovers that she has concealed his wife’s calamitous fate.

I left the theater that day — the Uris, then, renamed the Gershwin — in a daze.

Angela Lansbury, Broadway luminary, film actress and TV star, dies at 96

In 2010, Lansbury recounted for me the circumstances of her casting in “Sweeney”: a telegram to Ireland, where she maintained a home, from director Harold Prince: “ ‘Dear Angela, Steve Sondheim, Hugh Wheeler and I are preparing a production of ‘Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street.’ We would be interested to know if you would be interested in reading for the role of Nellie Lovett.’ ”

Lansbury had to “read for the role”! She had already garnered three Tony Awards (out of an eventual five, plus a lifetime achievement award earlier this year), for the original “Mame” and “Dear World” and a beloved revival of “Gypsy.” Such were the rigors of booking a job in the good old days; it’s now rare for stars of her accomplishment to submit to auditions. Back in New York, Lansbury said, Sondheim sang “The Worst Pies” for her — a tricky song rhythmically, involving the syncopated exertions of kneading of the pie dough. Lansbury was delighted. “ ‘This is something I’d have a lot of fun doing,’ “ she remembered thinking.

Our interview occurred on the occasion of Lansbury receiving the Stephen Sondheim Award from Signature Theatre in Arlington, Va. — the first person to be so honored after Sondheim himself. (And to be followed by Bernadette Peters, Carol Burnett, Harold Prince and other key figures in the Sondheim orbit.) We sat in her midtown Manhattan apartment, a cozy and unpretentious pied-à-terre, with a commanding view of the brick wall next door. She was both grandmotherly and girlish at the tender age of 85 and yet to perform what would be her final Broadway role, in 2012’s “The Best Man,” by Gore Vidal. The prospect of work still lit her up, as could memories of indelible triumphs like “Sweeney.”

“When I hear the recording, I think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ ” Lansbury observed that day, chuckling. Well, ambition, discipline and self-belief, for sure. You look over the sheer variety and volume of her résumé — movie roles stretching back to “Gaslight” and “National Velvet” during World War II, and 12 seasons as the star of CBS’s “Murder, She Wrote” in the 1980s and ’90s — and you can sense the voracious, Streep-size appetite for work.

Her collaboration with Sondheim, who died 11 months ago at 91, ranged over peerless hits — “Sweeney Todd” is being revived on Broadway this season, with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford — and storied flops. “Anyone Can Whistle,” an absurdist satire featuring Lansbury as the corrupt mayor of a dying town, ran for just seven days at the Majestic Theatre in 1964. It’s a flawed book musical that no nimble-minded creative team has ever been able to fix.

But soon after playing Laurence Harvey’s diabolical mother in director John Frankenheimer’s 1962 “The Manchurian Candidate” — Lansbury was only three years older than Harvey — the musical birthed a new Broadway life for her (she’d only been in straight plays on Broadway before “Whistle”).

Possessed of what she described as “a natural singing voice,” Lansbury told me that performing in a full-blown musical was basically a matter of training “and figuring out how loud I had to be to be heard over the orchestra.”

In her possession, too, it seems, was a highly reliable fearlessness: She was born in 1925 into a well-to-do London family that left for the United States at the onset of the Blitz. A dash of natural British fortitude never wore off.

“What you have to accept with me is, I would do whatever interested me to attempt; it’s the feeling of, ‘I would love to pull that off,’ ” she recalled on that afternoon a dozen years ago. “I’m also tickled and I’m proud that somebody would think that I could do a certain thing, and then would give me a chance. That has happened over and over and over again. That has given me confidence — that they believed I’d give them something that they wanted.”

In Lanbury’s juiciest stage turns, that confidence was palpable. I only know her 1966 “Mame” from endless replays of her voice on the cast album, singing Jerry Herman’s buoyant tunes, and her 1974 ″Gypsy” from accounts by friends who saw it. But as late as 2009, when audiences got the opportunity to watch her as Madame Armfeldt in the Catherine Zeta-Jones-headlined revival of “A Little Night Music,” she was still giving all of us something that we wanted. Her inimitable, irresistible self.