At 16 - she told the producers she was 19 - Lansbury found work in a Montreal nightclub. That early success came shortly after her family immigrated to America in 1940 during the London Blitz. Because I was successful so early in my life,” she explained, “I was able to help my brothers get started and go to college.” “My mother was shocked by the loss of her husband and depended on me enormously. “It was a huge event in my life,” Lansbury acknowledged, but one that forced her outward rather than inward. Kupeferberg, that her father’s death, when she was 9, spurred her “retreating into a fantasy world and playing at being other people.” Lansbury dismissed the notion, offered in a biography by Rob Edelman and Audrey F. Twin brothers came along four years after Angela was born. The daughter of a prosperous lumber merchant and the Irish actress Moyna Macgill, Angela (nickname “Bidsie”) had an older half-sister from her mother’s previous marriage to the actor and director Reginald Denham. Hers was a life, it seems, destined to be fulfilled in front of an audience. “As an individual,” she added in a brisk but telling addendum, “I think I’m the most boring thing on two feet.”Ī more succinct account of the psychological and emotional makeup of someone born to the theatrical manner is hard to imagine. I’ve never grown away from my ability to play roles, to become someone else. “I have been an actress for as long as I can remember, ever since I was very young. “The art of acting is a built-in ability I cannot take credit for,” she said. Speaking by phone from Los Angeles, Lansbury offered a bracingly simple explanation for her uncanny early and sustained success. Directed by Lansbury’s fellow octogenarian Michael Blakemore, the company features Charles Edwards (the newspaper editor Michael Gregson in “Downton Abbey”), Charlotte Parry (“Coram Boy”) and Jemima Rooper (“One Man, Two Guvnors”) as the ghost of a first wife. Lansbury, 89, brings her latest Tony-crowned triumph to San Francisco this month, reprising her performance as the dotty but disarmingly effective medium Madame Arcati in Nöel Coward’s ghost-haunted 1941 comedy “Blithe Spirit.” The touring production opens Tuesday, Jan.