The film-maker cast Lansbury in his exotic horror folk-tale The Company of Wolves, released in 1984. Here he remembers an actor who ‘always understood’
• Angela Lansbury dies aged 96 – news
• Angela Lansbury: the scene-stealing grande dame of stage and screen – appreciation
I had two Angelas in my life at one stage. Angela Carter (long gone and greatly missed) and Angela Lansbury (flew out of this world last night, equally greatly missed). There should be a ghost at your elbow, whose only purpose is to remind you how lucky you are.
I would travel over to Clapham Common in south London to work with the first Angela, dissecting her short story collection The Bloody Chamber into interlocking bites and fragments of upended fairy tales that would become The Company of Wolves. I ended up with the second Angela on a sound stage in Shepperton in a forest made of movable trees designed by Anton Furst, financed, somehow, by the producer Stephen Woolley.
