The Johnny Depp performance inspired by Angela Lansbury: “She was this force”
Having immersed himself deeply into a number of characters over the years, Johnny Depp has always had a tendency to climb outside of the box to find inspiration for his most memorable roles.
The actor is adamant that despite the obvious connotations, Michael Jackson wasn’t an influence on his Willy Wonka, and the star instead looked towards children’s TV hosts. Jack Sparrow was part Keith Richards and part Pepé Le Pew, so it’s not as if he’s ever been constricted by the notion of the obvious.
Still, Angela Lansbury is a bizarre one, with the endearing legend who packed her trophy cabinet full to the brim with six Tonys, a sextet of Golden Globes, and an honorary Academy Award making her presence felt under the most unusual of circumstances when Depp was required to exude sheer terror in a murderous gothic fantasy.
Murder, She Wrote may have been the role Lansbury was best known for after sleuthing her way through 12 seasons and over 250 episodes as Jessica Fletcher, but that wasn’t what Depp used as his jumping-off point, even when the gig in question cast him as an investigator. Instead, he looked towards John Guillermin’s star-studded 1978 adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile, which co-starred Lansbury alongside Mia Farrow, David Niven, Bette Davis, and Maggie Smith, among others.
Citing Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes and Roddy McDowall as other touchstones, Depp explained how Lansbury became pivotal to the creation of Sleepy Hollow protagonist Ichabod Crane, something not a lot of audience members would have even been able to pick up on.
“Angela Lansbury; the energy, the sort of righteousness that she had,” he told Spliced Wire. “I haven’t even seen Death On the Nile since I was very young, but she was this force, she was this presence. So those are the ingredients and you just sort of mash then all together and see what you come up with.”
In Burton’s Academy Award-winning box office hit Depp’s Crane finds himself dispatched to the titular town to investigate rumours of a headless horseman cutting a swathe through the local population. Digging into the truth of the matter, he gets more than he could have bargained for when Christopher Walken’s fearsome spirit upends his entire worldview.
Not to undersell it, but there’s not exactly a straight line to be drawn between his performance and Lansbury’s eighth-billed turn as Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile, but it must have held fairly major sway if Depp felt compelled to point it out.
Would anybody watch Sleepy Hollow and immediately name her as a clear and obvious influence on the leading man’s central turn? Probably not, even if it was definitely there in its own bespoke manner.
