When actress and singer Angela Lansbury came to Salt Lake City as the special guest at the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square’s Christmas concert in 2001, she said she “felt extremely nervous” of stepping onstage with the choir, according to the Church News’ archives.
That feeling didn’t stay. She said that she “belonged” to the choir.
“They made me,” she said of that sense of belonging during her the concert performances and “Music & the Spoken Word” broadcast, adding that she hadn’t previously felt “the kind of support and wonderful vigor and excitement that is contained within these walls. This is a very special, hallowed place.”
Lansbury, who died on Tuesday, Oct. 11, had a variety of roles in her career on the stage and screens large and small — and won multiple Tony Awards. She was the voice of Mrs. Potts in Disney’s animated “Beauty and the Beast” and the voice of the Grand Duchess Marie in the animated movie “Anastasia.” She also portrayed Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series “Murder, She Wrote.”
During the 2001 concert, titled “The Joy of Christmas,” she sang the title song “Beauty and the Beast,” and also “We Need a Little Christmas” from “Mame,” and “Not While I’m Around,” from “Sweeney Todd.”
She shared “A Christmas Story” of a boy in a community Christmas pageant who, while portraying an innkeeper, can’t help but offer his own room to Joseph and Mary. She also read Luke’s account of the birth of Jesus.
It was during the concert she had an experience she hasn’t felt before: “The spirit of this place is so evident. It is all enveloping. It’s all around me. I feel buoyed up by it. This has been one of the things I felt very strongly about being here. I didn’t realize that I was going to be hit by this extraordinary spirit. I haven’t experienced this before. It’s quite unique, people doing something for the love of it, not for the almighty [dollar], but just for the love of doing it, of joining together, expressing their sense of feelings about life and all of the qualities that are inherent in the [The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints]. This is something that is all totally new to me. I had never been exposed to it, and I didn’t understand what it was about. But I am really fascinated by it.”
