Angela Lansbury

She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.

Ms. But Ms. Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. For all her stage success, Ms. “We left everything behind,” Ms. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.” With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Lansbury was the winner of five Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina.

Lansbury won an Oscar nomination for her first role in the 1944 film Gaslight, and gained international acclaim as Murder, She Wrote's Jessica Fletcher.

She went on to receive an Oscar nomination for her first film role, aged 19, in the 1944 film Gaslight, and starred in the hit film National Velvet, as well as a steady stream of other MGM productions during the 1940s. A lead role as Rose in the West End transfer of Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy followed, as did roles in hit films and further musical theatre productions, including Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. A statement said: “The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1.30am, Tuesday 11 October 2022.

Lansbury's acting career extended over an extraordinary seven decades. She says she knew early on that she'd never be "groomed to be a glamorous movie star" ...

"Being Jessica was second nature to me because she embodied all of the qualities that I like about women," Lansbury said. She told Fresh Air's Terry Gross that she was "happily trapped" in the role of Jessica Fletcher, the mystery novelist who solved a murder every week. That way of acting a song served Lansbury very well when she starred as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy, and as the cold-blooded Mrs. "And, lo and behold, when she walked down that staircase in gold-lamé pajamas, in 1966, she was 40 years old and Broadway embraced her in a way that it has embraced few actresses in its storied history." Lansbury got the acting bug as a teenager, playing Audrey in a student production of As You Like It. Angela Lansbury was destined to become an actress; born in London, England in 1925, her mother was a leading lady of the British stage.

Angela Lansbury, the British-born actress whose career spanned eight decades and produced indelible portraits of a wide range of characters from ...

In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, who became her manager and the father of her son, Anthony, and daughter, Deirdre. In 1966, she became Broadway's reigning queen in "Mame." Lansbury studied drama and her movie career got off to a quick start. "Not since the heyday of Bette Davis had there been an actress of this range and accomplishment," wrote critic David Shipman. "You can go to town and chew on great chunks of scenery." The series, which ran from 1984 to 1996, brought her 11 of her 18 Emmy nominations.

Lansbury won five Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a lifetime achievement award. She earned Academy Award nominations as supporting actress for two ...

Angela Lansbury, the scene-stealing British actor who kicked up her heels in the Broadway musicals "Mame" and "Gypsy" and solved endless murders as crime.

In 2000, Lansbury withdrew from a planned Broadway musical, “The Visit,” because she needed to help her husband recover from heart surgery. Potts in “Beauty and the Beast” and sang the title song. She was back on Broadway in 2012 in a revival of “The Best Man,” sharing a stage with James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, Candice Bergen, Eric McCormack, Michael McKean and Kerry Butler. “The only thing I ever had confidence in is my ability to perform,” she said. She was offered a sitcom with Charles Durning or “Murder, She Wrote.” The producers had wanted Jean Stapleton, who declined. She was just 19 when her first film, “Gaslight,” earned her an Oscar nomination, but MGM didn’t know what to do with the new contract player. In 2009 she collected her fifth Tony, for best featured actress in a revival of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and in 2015 won an Olivier Award in the role. “Murder, She Wrote” and other television work brought her 18 Emmy nominations but she never won one. “Murder, She Wrote” stayed high in the ratings through its 11th year. For consolation, CBS contracted for two-hour movies of “Murder, She Wrote” and other specials starring Lansbury. “I had to lay down the law at one point and say ‘Look, I can’t do these shows in seven days; it will have to be eight days.'” She was a key person in welcoming me to the community.

Dame Angela Lansbury, one of the last surviving stars of Hollywood's golden age who won international acclaim as the star of the TV crime series Murder, ...

After a break of 22 years she was back on Broadway in 2007 in a production of Deuce. In 1945 she eloped with the matinee idol Richard Cromwell, who was 16 years her senior but the relationship failed after less than a year after he revealed he was gay. Despite her screen success she always kept in touch with the stage. "It's like being on a bicycle - I just put my foot down and keep going." She didn't abandon the cinema completely. she gives her finest film performance in it". She studied music and dancing before enrolling at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in 1939. "I loved it," she said. The New York Times opined: "Miss Lansbury is a singing-dancing actress, not a singer or dancer who also acts." She became a passionate cinemagoer and her mother also took her to the theatre. We had to grow up instantly, and take care of ourselves." Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in Poplar, east London on 16 October 1925.

Angela Lansbury, the big-eyed, scene-stealing British actress who solved endless murders as crime novelist Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series ...

"Women in motion pictures have always had a difficult time being role models for other women," she observed. She had achieved notice as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth. In 2009 she collected her fifth Tony, for best featured actress in a revival of Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit and in 2015 won an Olivier Award in the role.

Best known as the novelist-sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury's winning charm and towering talent stretches all the way back to the days ...

It amused Lansbury that she was a rare actor who would need to ‘age down’ to play the elderly matriarch, Mrs St Maugham. Perhaps appropriately, as the play was about seances, Lansbury told an interviewer that she felt her mother’s presence in the building. However, she subsequently had doubts about sustaining the stamina to play eight performances a week. In 1966, Lansbury was an unexpected casting for the musical Mame, in the lead role of an eccentric socialite during the Depression. Her career as best-selling crime writer JB Fletcher is launched, with a sideline as an amateur sleuth, solving murders that occur near her home, or in other locations (New York, Los Angeles, Hawaii) to which she has gone on book tours, or speaking engagements. Murder, She Wrote became something of a family business, with Lansbury’s second husband, Peter Shaw, and their son, Anthony, producing or directing many episodes. For the part, she lightly Americanised an accent that remained audibly English off-screen throughout her life. Cast in that on his recommendation, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM. She won five Tony awards, and continued to appear on Broadway and in the London West End until her 10th decade. Despite Oscar nominations for both Gaslight and her next film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lansbury never quite achieved the Hollywood career that seemed promised. Contradicting the common training of actors to channel their own emotional history into roles, she counselled: “Leave who you are at home ... Her movie career stretched from Gaslight in 1944 to the 2018 children’s films, Buttons and Mary Poppins Returns.

Versatile actor with a long career on stage and screen, best known as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote.

She was Aunt March in the BBC’s adaptation of Little Women (2017), and in 2018 she both appeared as a balloon-seller in Mary Poppins Returns, and joined up with another member of that cast, Dick Van Dyke, as guardian angels in the Christmas tale Buttons. The show, which has since become a concert favourite, closed in a week, but Lansbury came out of it with flying colours, commended by critics for her agility and engaging personality; she was even likened to a young Bette Davis. She won a second Tony in Herman’s next show, Dear World (1969), a musical based on Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, in which she appeared to be dressed in “a wedding cake made of cobwebs”, said the critic Walter Kerr. A belated London debut followed in 1972, when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in Edward Albee’s All Over, playing the mistress of a dying man, locked in battle with Peggy Ashcroft as his wife. A notable exception was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which she played Sibyl Vane, the chirpy music-hall singer, a role that brought her second Oscar nomination; through her co-star, Hurd Hatfield, she met her future husband, Shaw. [George Lansbury](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/31/in-the-footsteps-of-george-lansbury-lost-radical-who-led-an-east-end-rebellion), a reforming leader of the Labour party and East End hero); her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an Irish actor who took Angela to the Old Vic theatre in London from an early age. Subsequently, she was with Jim Carrey in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011). By this point a Hollywood fixture, Lansbury played Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in National Velvet (1944), sang Jerome Kern’s How’d You Like to Spoon With Me? She was educated at South Hampstead high school for girls and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. When Moyna’s agent sent her to Hollywood for an audition, she decided to move the children out there with her. On her film debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win one. Her performance was more nuanced and needy than Merman’s; the critic Robert Cushman described “a slow steady build towards magnificence”.