Don't call it a comeback

This interview with the great Angela Lansbury (about her first Broadway turn in more than 20 years) doesn't go far enough; it's like the reporter didn't want to know how The Picture of Dorian Gray's Sibyl Vane and The Manchurian Candidate's Commie Mommy folded into sleuth Jessica Fletcher, Cabot Cove's most famous mystery writer, whose sinister bubbliness always put on notice the second and third-rate actors populating "Murder, She Wrote." This old essay in The Stranger comes closest. Ms. Lansbury apparently recorded an exercise video in the eighties called, naturally, Positive Moves: A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being at Any Age. Stacey Levine says it's "a staggering document--a nutty, busy 50 minutes of health advice, family anecdotes, muscle stretches, and thoughts on womanhood, as the cameras point continuously toward Angie."