Angela Lansbury’s Connecticut legacy includes an Edward Albee premiere, a major theater award and ‘Gypsy’ at the Oakdale

Angela Lansbury, who died on Wednesday just five days before her 97th birthday, came from an era when actors regularly took theater roles when they were in between movies or TV gigs.

Lansbury was a major star from the mid-1940s — when she was featured in such films as “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Gaslight” and “National Velvet” — well into the 21st century as the Balloon Lady in “Mary Poppins Returns,” with everything from “The Manchurian Candidate” to “Beauty and the Beast” and a 12-year-run of “Murder, She Wrote” in between.

Considering how busy she was onscreen for so many decades, it makes her frequent live stage work all the more remarkable.

Lansbury was as big a star in the theater as she was in movies or TV. On Broadway, she starred in three Stephen Sondheim musicals — ”Anyone Can Whistle,” “Sweeney Todd” and “A Little Night Music” — plus “Gypsy,” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics but not the music. She also originated the role of “Mame” in the musical based on the Patrick Dennis novel and led major revivals of “The King and I” and the Noël Coward play “Blithe Spirit.”

Angela Lansbury’s legendary versatility as a stage actress can be demonstrated just by the shows she did in Connecticut.

In 1977, Lansbury starred at Hartford Stage in an evening of one-act plays by Edward Albee, “Counting the Ways” and “Listening,” directed by Albee himself. A few months later, she was back in the state in one of her best-known roles, as Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” which she’d played in a Broadway revival and continued to play in productions in the U.S. and Europe for much of the 1970s.

The Albee plays came about through the playwright’s long association with Hartford Stage, happening at a time when he was having trouble getting his new plays produced in New York. The three-character “Counting the Ways” and the two-character “Listening” had both been produced in London. Linking the one-acts together by having the same actress in both of them made for a full-length evening and gave them a new resonance.

An Albee world premiere in Connecticut was a big deal, and so was one starring Angela Lansbury. The New York Times reported that “critics drove up from New York and wrote some disparaging reviews. However, the theatergoers in Hartford disagreed. They bought every seat in the house right through to the end of the engagement ... even including some folding chairs added at the ends of the aisles.”

In the article, Albee credited Lansbury’s participation for driving ticket sales.

The 1977 summer “Gypsy” tour came to the Oakdale in Wallingford, which is now known as an indoor concert hall but was created as an outdoor theater with an unorthodox arena-style set-up under a tent. Lansbury, who played Rose in a “Gypsy” revival in London in 1973-74, brought her interpretation to Broadway in 1974-75, then toured the country in the musical on and off through 1978. It became one of her signature theater roles, which she stopped doing when she found another role of a lifetime, that of Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd” in 1979.

There were other Lansbury sightings in Connecticut over the years. A 2007 story in the Courant noted that Lansbury attended a reading of the new play “Chick, the Great Osram” at Hartford Stage. The play was about the legendary Wadsworth Atheneum director Chick Austin, whom Lansbury knew personally. She even wrote an introduction to a book about Austin’s celebrated house on Hartford’s Scarborough Street.

In 2008, Lansbury was the honoree at a gala fundraising concert at Westport Country Playhouse featuring two other performers who’d been associated with Broadway productions of “Gypsy,” Bernadette Peters and Laura Benanti.

In 2012, Lansbury received the Monte Cristo Award given at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford. The award is presented at a star-studded New York ceremony each year to “a prominent artist whose work has had an extraordinary impact on American theater.”

“Murder Through the Looking Glass,” an episode in the fourth season of Lansbury’s TV series, “Murder, She Wrote,” was set in Hartford at a New England Booksellers Association convention.

Strangely, though she appeared on Broadway over a dozen times, Lansbury apparently never trod the stage of the historic Shubert in New Haven, the site for many pre-Broadway tryouts. Lansbury’s last Broadway appearance does have a Connecticut connection, however. She played Sue-Ellen Gamadge in the 2012 revival of Gore Vidal’s political play “The Best Man,” directed by former Hartford Stage artistic director Michael Wilson.

Christopher Arnott can be reached at carnott@courant.com .