Angela Lansbury on THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE

With its simmering tensions and fractured psyches, John Frankenheimer’s 1962 Cold War thriller THE MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE presented an ideal platform for its cast to deliver some of the finest work of their careers. As Major Bennett Marco, Frank Sinatra is heroic yet vulnerable in his search for the truth, and Laurence Harvey is fascinating as Raymond Shaw—alternately a dead-eyed, brainwashed assassin and a lovesick loner. But it’s Dame Angela Lansbury’s chilling and complex portrayal of Mrs. Eleanor Shaw Iselin, the sinister matriarch of a political family, that remains one of the film’s most captivating elements.

Here, watch a clip from our interview with Lansbury, who visited Criterion back in November, in which she discusses the importance of imagination in acting and how she drew on that quality for the film’s shocking climax.