Angela Lansbury's Best Movie And TV Roles

Anyone who grew up with Lansbury as the warmhearted granny from "Beauty and the Beast" or "Murder, She Wrote" will be shocked to see how bad of a momma she could play in something like "The Manchurian Candidate." She is positively chilling as Eleanor Shaw Iselin, a cold-blooded Senator's wife who'll stop at nothing to ascend to the White House, even if it means manipulating her brainwashed son, Raymond (Laurence Harvey).

Directed by John Frankenheimer, it centers on Korean War veteran Raymond Shaw (Harvey), who returns home from a POW camp as a decorated hero. But his friend and fellow soldier, Major Bennett Marco (Frank Sinatra), suspects something is amiss. As it turns out, Raymond has been brainwashed by Communists to become an unknowing assassin, triggered to enter a hypnotic state and kill whenever he plays a game of solitaire.

Lansbury steals the show as Raymond's controlling, incestuous mother, who guides her son to murder a political candidate so that her husband — the incompetent, bombastic Senator John Iselin (James Gregory) — can become a presidential nominee. It's a bravura performance that earned Lansbury her third Oscar nomination as Best Supporting Actress, plus victories at the Golden Globes and National Board of Review. You'd have to assume Oscar voters were brainwashed not to hand her a victory for her career-best work (she lost to Patty Duke playing Helen Keller in "The Miracle Worker").