Happy Birthday, Dame Angela Lansbury!

The esteemed and beloved actress turns 94 today, and though she's best remembered for her roles in light-hearted big-screen classics like Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Beauty and the Beast; or for her long-running TV show Murder, She Wrote; or for a decades-long theater career that has netted her an astonishing five Tonys, her finest moment in my mind has always been her turn in 1962's The Manchurian Candidate.

Dealing with the all-too relevant topic of a presidential candidate under the sway of a foreign government, the film starred a career-best Frank Sinatra as Korean War vet and former POW Bennett Marco; Laurence Harvey as his brainwashed colleague from a prominent political family, Raymond Shaw; and Lansbury, though only three years older than Harvey, as his Machiavellian mother, Mrs. Eleanor Iselin. And boy, does she play the hell out of it.

Mrs. Iselin is the queen of hearts, literally and figuratively. Shaw was brainwashed as a prisoner of war in Korea, and his mother is the one behind it all. He's set off by the queen of hearts, which bears a striking resemblance to Mrs. Iselin, in a deck of cards. Transfixed, he'll do anything he's told. Mrs. Iselin's plan is to get her drunk and inept husband (and Shaw's stepfather), the McCarthy-esque U.S. Senator John Yerkes Iselin (James Gregory), promoted to the top of their party's presidential ticket by assassinating the nominee. And she wholly intends for her own son to pull the trigger.

Talk about cold-blooded. Sinatra had originally wanted Lucille Ball to play the mother, but was convinced to go with Lansbury after director John Frankenheimer insisted he watch her performance in another film he directed in which she plays a manipulative mother: All Fall Down, also from 1962. Between those two films, Lansbury won the National Board of Review's award for Best Supporting Actress. She also scooped up the Golden Globe in the same category for The Manchurian Candidate, but lost the Oscar to 16-year-old Patty Duke for her role in The Miracle Worker.

In 2007, Time ranked Lansbury's Mrs. Iselin as one of the 25 greatest villains in cinematic history. Hers were big, evil shoes to fill, but if anyone could do it, it would be Meryl Streep, right? The serial Oscar-snatcher was cast in the Lansbury role for the 2004 remake of The Manchurian candidate directed by Jonathan Demme, which co-starred Denzel Washington as Marco and Liev Schreiber as Shaw.

However, while Streep garnered favorable reviews, the movie wasn't received as favorably and isn't nearly as memorable as the original. And even though La Meryl can literally just walk onto a film set and get nominated for an Oscar—case in point, and yes, I will say this again, The Iron Lady—she was overlooked for this one when the time came. But some people probably didn't mind the snub.

"I have a great admiration for Meryl Streep," Lansbury said in 2004, ahead of the remake's release. "She'll probably be interesting. I just wish she hadn't chosen to do it."

She added, "I'm so sorry they had to mess with something that was so perfect."

Take a glimpse of some of that perfection, with Lansbury's iconic monologue as Mrs. Eleanor Iselin, below: