This Utterly Delightful Clip Of Angela Lansbury Recording ‘Be Our Guest’ Is Going Viral After Her Passing, As It Should

On Tuesday, the world lost Angela Lansbury, who passed away mere days shy of what would have been her 97th birthday. Over her long career, the British-born actress was many things: a starlet signed to MGM during the Golden Age of Hollywood; a three-time Oscar-nominee; a Tony-winning musical theater goddess and gay icon; a TV staple who spent 12 seasons on Murder, She Wrote.

Lansbury was also a major part of one of Disney’s biggest-ever hits: 1991’s Beauty and the Beast, in which she voiced Mrs. Potts, the cook-turned-teacup. Her big song was “Be Our Guest,” which she sang alongside Jerry Orbach’s maître d’-turned-candelabra Lumière. It’s a really charming song, maybe the movie’s peak number. Upon news of Lansbury’s passing, people shared not just the movie sequence but the behind-the-scenes footage of them recording it, which might actually be even more delightful than the scene itself.

In the clip, Lansbury is really into it. She makes faces, she contorts her body, she acts it out. Orbach, too, is really into it, and if you only know him as the stern dad from Dirty Dancing or the driven NYPD detective from Law & Order, it should be mindblowing.

Lansbury’s career was long and diverse, and social media was clogged with clips of her work after she passed on. So while we’re here, here’s a bit of a gear shift: her blood-curdling, Academy Award-nominated turn as one of the screen’s worst-ever moms in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate.