MovieChat Forums > Angela Lansbury Discussion > She's one of those people who never seem...

She's one of those people who never seemed young.


She started playing mature women when she was about twenty, and kept playing the same sort of roles for the next fifty or sixty years.

She's dpent her life bring as close to ageless as a human being can be!

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She is ageless. I'm pleased to see she's still working into her nineties. I heard her singing 'The Age of Not Believing' yesterday. From 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks.' Great interpretation.

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Ernest Borgnine was like that too.

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She was only 17 when she appeared in Gaslight. She played a girl who had been around the block a few times.... not young. On the other hand, in The Picture of Dorian Gray, she seemed quite young, fresh and sweet.

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It's true, "Dorian Gray" is playing right now, and it's the only film where she ever seemed young! Of course, it came three years after she played the scary adult politician in "Woman of the Year".

Patrick Stewart is another actor who seems to have been middle-aged for about sixty years, BTW.

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Another actor who has always seemed old is Jason Robards. He even seemed like an old man in Long Day's Journey Into Night, and he was one of the sons.

Unfortunately, I don't get cable. No Turner Classics, sadly. However, I do have Roku. Happily, I can watch it. My Retro Flix has this version on there! You have put me in the mood. I can make it a double feature and watch Gaslight!
By the way, Speaking of pretty boys, try watching the 70s version of Dorian Gray on YouTube. It's good! If you are at all familiar with the Soap opera, Dark Shadows, you will see that it is produced by Dan Curtis, the creator of DS. Some of the music is taken right from that soap.

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/////and Gene Hackman he has played 60 for 40 years

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Agree. Maggie Smith I think is much the same.

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Yep -- in All Fall Down she played the mother of Warren Beatty (12 years younger) and in The Manchurian Candidate she played the mother of Laurence Harvey (THREE years younger) and pulls it off perfectly both times.

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Max Von Sydow and Carrol O’Connor too.

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In National Velvet, Angela looks more like Liz Taylor's aunt than her sister.

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She’s the opposite of Leonardo DiCaprio, who always looks 16 no matter how old he is.

Johnny Depp too - that dude does not look 60.

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Sadly, time has caught up with them both, even if they both kept their looks far longer than most humans. Depp now looks like the aging alcoholic he is, and DiCaprio looks like, well, a teenager made up as a bloated fifty-year-old.

I have no idea why DiCaprio still looks a bit teenagery, even though he's nearly fifty and not aging particularly well, it's something about the proportions of his face.

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As far as looking "teenagery", no one looked that way longer than The Karate Kid himself, Ralph Macchio.

Some folks just have very mature looking faces at a young age like Angela Lansbury. But she continued to look middle aged into old age. Always an elegant looking lady.

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It’s also to do with testosterone levels. Men looked mature in their 20’s back in the day, by their 30’s they had gravitas. Di Caprio signalled the new low-T male who looks like a teenybopper in his 50’s, newer generations have even less testosterone.

It’s why the age of the movie star is dying, nobody really commands the screen like they used to.

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