Angela Lansbury, our star of the month for January, is the rarest of birds. Not only did she receive Academy Award nominations for her first and third films (what a way to start a career in Hollywood!), she has earned bragging rights to working in films alongside an amazing group of imposing fellows (among them Spencer Tracy and Elvis Presley, also Orson Welles, Paul Newman, Frank Sinatra, Warren Beatty and Gene Kelly) and has teamed with numerous lofty ladies as well (Elizabeth Taylor when ET was 12 and again when Liz was 48, also Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Sophia Loren, Hedy Lamarr, Katharine Hepburn, Maggie Smith and Judy Garland, to name but a handful).

Further, she has made films with directors as diverse as John Frankenheimer and Cecil B. DeMille, George Cukor and Michael Curtiz, Frank Capra and Harold Prince. She has also played every kind of role imaginable, from elegant socialites to nasty maids, from mothers from hell to England's elegant Queen Anne, as well as vixens, demure ladies and even a coffee pot named Mrs. Potts. (While supplying the voice of that pot in Disney's animated Beauty and the Beast she introduced the movie's title tune, which went on to win the Oscar® for "Best Music, Original Song" of 1991.)

If Angela were the bragging type, which she decidedly isn't, she could also lay claim to a wholesale conquering of Broadway (winning five Tony® Awards) and a similar level of stardom on television (where her work has brought her 18 Emmy® nominations so far, and where she starred for 12 seasons in the enormously popular series Murder, She Wrote). When you add those successes to the work she's done during her 67-year film career, you realize what a unique status she holds in the entertainment arena: no other person has had the level of success in films and television and on the Broadway stage that she has--and awesome Angela is still very much in the game, a true long-distance runner.

Here at TCM, we're very pleased to be starting this brand new year of 2012 with a month full of Lansbury movies, which will include the Private Screenings interview she did with me in 2006. That conversation, in fact, inspired the addition of a gem to this month's Lansbury film lineup. Near the end of that particular interview, she speaks of the impact the Sondheim musical Sweeney Todd had on her career when she created it on Broadway in 1979. She says, "It was a benchmark in Stephen Sondheim's career (and) a huge, huge success for me." She predicts that "Down the road (despite all the other work I've done) that's what I'll be remembered for, no question about it." Well, in addition to the 27 theatrical films of hers that we'll be showing on Wednesdays this month, on January 25, we'll bring you--a little drum roll here--Angela L. in a 1982 filmed-for-PBS incarnation of Sweeney Todd, as she so memorably did it on Broadway.

Ah, yes. At TCM, we like to leave no stone unturned, no jewel ignored. And this January, the Lansbury gems will be varied, plentiful, memorable, sparkling and definitely worth checking out. Guaranteed!

by Robert Osborne