Angela Lansbury: ‘I was more than just boobs and good legs’

Angela Lansbury lives a few miles west of Beverly Hills, in a house that looks as if it’s been uprooted from the Home Counties. The moment I arrive, she bustles me into her living room like a no-nonsense headmistress. Immediately, I glance a photograph of her with the Clintons, then the awards that cluster around her bookshelves – five Tonys and six Golden Globes, for roles as various as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running crime series Murder, She Wrote and Mrs Lovett, the pie-making accomplice of Sweeney Todd in Stephen Sondheim’s musical. On her mantelpiece sits her honorary Oscar, engraved with the words ENTERTAINMENT ICON. “Pick it up,” she says. “Isn’t that the heaviest thing you’ve ever felt?”