Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury had connections with artists and actors and politicians
16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022
General Brief Obituary: American actress Angela Lansbury was born in London in 1925 and moved to New York where she attended drama school.
So, life for Angela Lansbury began in 1943 when George Cukor at MGM gave her a part in his movie Gaslight. Angela claimed to be 19 years old, going on 20, but was 17. Also, she was not American but British-Irish; and she was a survivor. There is a touch of Becky Sharp from Thackeray’s novel Vanity Fair (1847/48) about her and also with the girl played by Tatum O’Neal in the 1973 movie Paper Moon. Angela Lansbury had confidence, yes, though not the confidence of a trickster. She possessed the confidence of a girl raised in an upper-middle-class world of talent and political players. It was not a world of money but a world of influence. George Lansbury, her grandfather, had grown up in poverty yet made his way to become Leader of the British Labour Party. In his political career he championed women’s rights, workers’ rights, Irish rights, and Indian rights to independence. A Radical! A Red! (He called himself a Christian Democrat). He was certainly an influencer; though, for many of the comfy classes, he was a thoroughly bad influence. He had visited Lenin in 1919 after the Russian Revolution. He had visited Franklin Delano Roosevelt after his election in 1932. Doors seemed to open for him. He also visited Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler - who assured him of peaceful intentions.
You never knew who might drop in for tea at the Lansbury house. It could be George Bernard Shaw for example - the only man to receive both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar. It might be a Labour Party member, in particular Clement Attlee who took over as Leader of the Labour Party in 1935; and, in that same year George’s son Edgar Lansbury, father of Angela, died of cancer. Edgar had been Leader of the British Communist Party - a fact suppressed in the Brief and Cursory Obituary of his daughter Angela. The name Lansbury was in the German Black Book, or Sonderfahndungsliste G.B in June 1940, which listed 2700 people to be arrested (and exterminated) after the Invasion of England. The Ustinovs were traitors.
Peter Ustinov
Angela Lansbury’s older sister Isolde brought home a pair of young German aristocrats who attended the exclusive St Pauls School. One of them, Rudolf von Ribbentrop, was son of the German Ambassador to London. His companion, Peter Alexander Freiherr von Ustinov, was son of the ambassador’s Press Attaché. Peter Ustinov married Isolde Lansbury and became Angela’s brother-in-law.
Peter Ustinov’s father despised Ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop and The Nazi Party which he served. So, in the hope of averting war, he passed German secrets to the British Security Service MI5. In return, the Ustinovs received British citizenship and deep cover during the Second World War. Peter Ustinov was German, not Russian.
His companion, Rudolf, was one of the last people to visit Adolf Hitler in the Berlin Bunker together with his father. He had known Hitler since childhood and found him barely recognisable: ‘His face was gray and puffy, his bearing bent in a way that looked as if he had a hump, holding one uncontrollably shaking hand with the other, his steps a shuffle.’
Joachim von Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg. Rudolf von Ribbentrop lived to the age of 98 and died in 2019.
