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Obituary - Muriel Angelus
The Guardian-
9/
2/
2004
One of Rodgers and Hart's greatest hits, Falling In Love With Love, was
first sung in the 1938 Broadway production of The Boys From Syracuse by
Muriel Angelus, who has died aged 95. The New York Times critic thought
her portrayal of Adriana in this musical adaptation of The Comedy Of
Errors "a monument to precariously controlled wifely patience", and
that she sang "with exquisite sweetness". Unfortunately, her sweetly
exquisite soprano voice was heard too seldom in a career that began at
the age of 12 and ended at 33.
Born in London of Scottish parents, the blonde Muriel Angelus Findlay
began singing in music halls before entering films in 1928 in the
silent The Ringer, the first of three versions of the Edgar Wallace
play. A year later, she was in Germany for Maskottchen, based on an
operetta by Walter Bromme, in which she played "the other woman". If
the producers had waited a few months for sound, they could have
included the songs.
In her first talkie, Night Birds (1930), she got to sing a number in a
West End revue, in which a detective, on the trail of her fugitive
boyfriend, disguises himself as a chorus boy. More serious was Hindle
Wakes (1931), the first sound version of Stanley Houghton's 1912 play,
where Angelus portrayed Beatrice Farrar, the respectable fiancee of
Alan Jeffcote, a Lancashire mill-owner's son, who refuses to go away
with him for a naughty weekend. Instead, he takes a mill girl, only to
return to Beatrice after the girl remembers her "place". Jeffcote was
played by the Scottish-born actor John Stuart, whom Angelus married
during the shooting of the film.
They then appeared together in Let's Love And Laugh (1931), an
inconsequential comedy-drama in which she was the daughter of a
publisher, and he an aspiring writer. She then embarked on several
farcical comedies, some directed and starring Monty Banks (Mario
Bianchi), the husband of Gracie Fields, with titles such as My Wife's
Family (1932), So You Won't Talk (1935), and Blind Spot (1932), in
which she played an amnesiac, a melodrama Angelus would have wanted to
forget.
In 1936, she starred in the Eric Maschwitz stage musical Balalaika at
the Adelphi Theatre in London. Angelus was ravishing as Lydia, a ballet
dancer and singer, who falls in love in Paris with an exiled Russian
prince after the Bolshevik Revolution. It was the sort of thing that
went down very well in the West End in the 1930s, and it ran for over a
year. It led to Angelus being offered the role of Adriana in The Boys
From Syracuse, and a contract with Paramount, for whom she made four
prestigious films.
The first was William Wellman's The Light That Failed (1939), the
second remake of the Rudyard Kipling novel, which tells of the
desperate attempt of a painter (Ronald Colman) to finish his greatest
painting - of a prostitute (Ida Lupino) - before he goes blind. In a
moving scene, Angelus, as the now blind artist's girlfriend, has to
hide the fact from him that the painting has been slashed by the
prostitute in a jealous rage.
Of the three last films she made, all in 1940 - Safari, a studio-bound
jungle melodrama with Douglas Fairbanks Jr as "the best hunter in West
Africa"; The Way Of All Flesh, in which Angelus was a thieving
adventuress; and The Great McGinty - the last is by far the most
memorable. In this, Preston Sturges' first feature, about a tramp
(Brian Donlevy) who becomes state governor by craft and graft, Angelus
played his secretary, offering to become his public wife for the sake
of the "women's vote". Angelus triumphs as the sole character with half
a conscience in one of Hollywood's best satires.
After another success in a Broadway musical, Early To Bed (1943-44), as
the madame of a bordello in pre-war Martinique, which people, for
reasons known only to the librettist, keep mistaking for a girls'
school, Angelus left show business. In 1946, long divorced from Stuart,
she married Paul Lavelle, the conductor of the Radio City Music Hall
orchestra.
Fifteen years later, Lavelle and Angelus recorded Tribute To Rodgers
And Hammerstein, in which, naturally, she sung Falling In Love With
Love. She is survived by her daughter from her second marriage.
· Muriel Angelus, actor, born March 10 1909; died August 22 2004 |
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