He was an excellent impressionist — targeting, somewhat scandalously for the time, many white actors such as John Wayne and Walter Brennan rather than solely black stars such as Bill Cosby and Pearl Bailey — and, for a man of his ample girth, an unexpectedly agile dancer.
With a girth of 22 feet 6 inches and a height of 40 metres, the elm was identified by the botanist R. H. Richens as an Ulmus × hollandica hybrid, before it succumbed to Dutch Elm Disease in the 1970s.
In 1962, Landers made a memorable appearance in The Twilight Zone episode "A Piano in the House", playing Marge Moore, an overweight woman who is forced to reveal her inner sadness about feeling unloved and unwanted because of her girth.
Notable specimens include one at Osterley Park 14 m tall and 1.5 m girth, and the largest, 18 m tall, at Avondale Forest Park, County Wicklow, Ireland.
The most noticeable of these is the ancient yew that dominates the church yard, believed to be one of the oldest in the country with a girth of some nine metres.