How Angela Lansbury made Disney magic – in just two films

“You wanna know anything about tea, I could tell ya!” the late Angela Lansbury piped up in Disney’s recording studio in June 1990, in between laying down her imperishable vocals for Be Our Guest – the now beloved showstopper from Beauty and the Beast, in which her singing teapot shared the limelight with French-accented candlestick Lumiere, played by Jerry Orbach. Voicing Mrs Potts came naturally to Lansbury – she admitted to having a large collection of teapots in her own home. And yet the extra value she gave to this hardly epochal role, and to this film, was immense.

Video footage of Lansbury recording the song survives, and forms rather a special part of the documentary Howard on Disney+ – the unbearably sad story of the song’s lyricist, Howard Ashman, who was in the terminal stages of Aids during this session, and would die less than a year afterwards.

What strikes you most about Lansbury’s performance is – fittingly enough – its astonishingly animated quality. That twittering excitement she manages to funnel in, with the cor-blimey-guvnor accent that’s a repurposing of her Mrs Lovett from Sweeney Todd, sets her whole body in motion. She prances and coos, holding her hands fluttering up to her face, and wrinkles her features (“heaven’s sakes, is that a spot?”) as she bustles her way through Ashman’s inspired riffs.

Whatever phoned-in voice work you could accuse some bored actors of doing in sound booths over the years, Lansbury worked at the literal opposite of that spectrum, bringing every ounce of vitality she could to this essentially ceremonial part. It’s hardly any wonder that her Mrs Potts is a favourite character for plenty of children across the Disney canon, and instantly recognisable from a single trill.

Alan Menken has often said that his Be Our Guest melody was composed as a temp track, and stayed put because he couldn’t find anything better to replace it with. It might have been rather ordinary, but thanks to Ashman, Orbach, and – the cherry on top – Lansbury’s largesse, it holds up as one of Disney’s most durable explosions of joy.

There’s that, and there’s also Lansbury’s tremulous work on the Oscar-winning, Broadway-inspired title ballad – perhaps the most proudly tear-jerking achievement from Menken and Ashman’s entire songbook, which is hardly to be sniffed at, either.

Twenty years before, Lansbury had made much her most lavish bid to be a Disney queen in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) – in fact, her only other bid, unless you count her cameo as the balloon lady (turned down by Julie Andrews) in Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

What a deeply bizarre, inescapably trippy film Bedknobs and Broomsticks is, and yet, how deeply cherished, from a hallowed period when Disney could seemingly get away with anything. Nazi invasions being fended off by Lansbury’s prim witch on a broomstick and suits of ghostly armour reanimated? Sure!

“Substitutiary Locomotion” – that’s the pet name of Miss Eglantine Price for her mystic powers – is the name of the game. The film was developed in the early 1960s while the rights to Mary Poppins were on hold, then shelved by Disney until the end of the decade, because it was just too similar, with its vision of supernatural childcare in wartime London and songs by the Sherman brothers. Assembled with the same director (Robert Stevenson) and male lead (David Tomlinson), the resulting film was in danger of playing like a knock-off.

But that’s where Lansbury came in, with her eerie knack for making us all suspend disbelief and hang on her every word – even when those words were nonsense inventions – “Treguna… Mekoides… Trecorum Satis Dee!”. And there went the hands again, aloft and fluttering, the eyes wide pools of enchantment. It made total sense for Lansbury to be summoning whatever wacky spells the film felt like inventing for her, and indeed, she gave its creators the perfect excuse to experiment and wig out. We were never in danger of being snapped back to order by Julie Andrews.

Thus far, Bedknobs and Broomsticks has managed to resist the Disney remake treatment: when asked about any such prospect at a Mary Poppins Returns junket, Lansbury laughed it off. A fan-made poster, which seemed to be suggesting Kate Winslet had been cast, was circulated around the same time – someone had photoshopped Winslet’s face onto the body of Claire Foy from The Crown, with Dolores Umbridge’s hair from Harry Potter, and thought that might do.

Without Lansbury, though, what exactly is Bedknobs and Broomsticks? A rinky-dink contraption with the sorcery missing. She was Disney’s original good witch, and even the light dusting of her magic to immortalise Mrs Potts worked wonders.