John Waters claims that he saw Angela Lansbury in 'dungeon-like sex club'.
The sad news was announced last week that the iconic actor, most famous for starring in long-running whodunit Murder, She Wrote, had passed away at the age of 96.
Since then, those who knew her have offered their condolences and shared memories of time they spent with her.
One of the most surprising anecdotes to come out, however, was made by Waters.
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The film director was speaking to Page Six this week when he recalled seeing Lansbury at a famous New York sex club back in the 1980s.
Hellfire was a sex dungeon built around an old subway platform in the city's Meatpacking District.
Waters told the outlet: "It may have been the only night she was ever there, but just her presence made Hellfire a little more welcoming.
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"[Angela] was pure class even forty years ago when these kind of clubs were all the rage."
The encounter was originally noted in Waters' 2019 book of essays Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder.
It resurfaced following an article by Ed Gunts in LGBTQ Nation.
In the book, Waters describes the club as a 'sex dungeon'. Recalling his encounter with the actor, he said: "Everybody went. She wasn’t doing anything. It was in Hellfire, and Hellfire was a straight gay bar [where] people had sex.
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"You would be standing there talking about the new novel of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and a [penis] would come through a glory hole and — ha ha ha — then you just move down.
"I saw her there but [with] a whole bunch of people. You went slumming there. I mean, Warhol would go there. Truman Capote. People would go there.
"You could not have to participate. You could go there. You might be sitting there talking to somebody and look down and someone’s licking your shoe. You just kick them away. But then they like that so then you had to say, ‘Thanks!' and then they would go away.
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"But it was a bar that you can’t imagine. I saw lots of celebrities there."
Lansbury's family released a statement on 11 October, in which they confirmed the news that she had died.
It read: "The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday.
"In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury. She was preceded in death by her husband of 53 years, Peter Shaw."
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Topics: Celebrity, Entertainment
Dominic Smithers