Angela Lansbury

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.

While probably best known to television audiences as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running detective series Murder, She Wrote, her performances in two classic ...

She is also the recipient of the National Medal of the Arts and the Kennedy Center Honors, and she was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 1994. Howard and Alan wrote the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ ballad with her in mind and she recorded it with a live orchestra, her voice tinged with melancholy, in just one take. For her first Disney role, Angela lobbied producer and co-writer Bill Walsh for the lead in Bedknobs and Broomsticks. She dazzled Broadway audiences with her interpretation of the madcap title role, displaying, for the first time, the full range of her extraordinary talents. From there, she went on to make more than 40 films, including The Harvey Girls (1946) with Judy Garland, State of the Union (1948) with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, and The Manchurian Candidate (1962), for which she received her third Oscar nomination. Potts in Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (1997), as well as in the video game Kingdom Hearts II (2006).

She became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in the television series. Read more at straitstimes.com.

She became a star in the title role of the 1966 musical Mame, about rich New Yorkers during the Depression, for which she trod the boards more than 1,500 times and won her first Tony Award. She won her fifth Tony award in 2009 for her Broadway role as dotty clairvoyant Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's Blithe Spirit. I am a character actress," she told BBC radio in 2014. just five days shy of her 97th birthday," a statement widely quoted in US media said. "She's the utmost professional," Michael Blakemore, who directed her in the play, was quoted as saying in The Guardian newspaper in 2015. She was 96.

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.

By Elsa Maishman · Dame Angela Lansbury, who won international acclaim as the star of the US TV crime series Murder, She Wrote, has died aged 96. · The three-time Oscar nominee had a career spanning eight decades, across film, theatre and television.

Angela Lansbury was that artist." She earned Oscar nominations for her role as the maid in Gaslight, and as Sibyl in The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1945, and Laurence Harvey's manipulative mother in The Manchurian Candidate in 1962. The show made her one of the wealthiest women in the US at the time, with a fortune estimated at $100m. She was noticed by a Hollywood executive at a party in 1942, and given her first role as a maid in the 1944 film Gaslight. "The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles," the family said. Born in 1925, she was one of the last surviving stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

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

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.

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”.

"The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles... just five days shy of her ...

She became a star in the title role of the 1966 musical Mame, about rich New Yorkers during the Depression, for which she trod the boards more than 1,500 times and won her first Tony Award. just five days shy of her 97th birthday," a statement widely quoted in US media said. I am a character actress," she told BBC radio in 2014. She was 96. "She's the utmost professional," Michael Blakemore, who directed her in the play, was quoted as saying in The Guardian newspaper in 2015. "The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles...

Broadway and Hollywood stars remember the stage and screen actress Angela Lansbury who died at the age of 96.

An icon of the stage, and legend across so many mediums but, we all knew…she was always one of us,” [Aduba tweeted.](https://twitter.com/UzoAduba/status/1579931447062040577) Even though I had to pee I refused to leave my seat during intermission,” [Ferguson tweeted](https://twitter.com/jessetyler/status/1579925382115250176?s=20&t=6DuaEyXrHxF-JvFkEw3w8Q). [Angela Lansbury](https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/angela-lansbury-dead.html), celebrities and stars from the world of Hollywood and Broadway poured out tributes online to honor the late actress.

She performed without sentimentality or histrionics, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining professional and approachable.

“And when I say I took care of him,” she said, with as much overt emotion as I ever heard from her, “I really took care of him.” Feeling through action was the Lansbury touch, and if it came at some cost to her, it never showed. What showed was the brilliance of her technique, informed by feeling you couldn’t in fact see. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.” [who died on Tuesday at 96](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/arts/angela-lansbury-dead.html), was “boring as all get out,” as she later added, that too was a costume, and a tool. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t stand up for herself and her characters. The technician is like a great musician: I play this note and then I stop.” She was already independent, unafraid and a problem solver: The corollary was that she needed to play many different kinds of characters, to make the best yield of all she’d observed. And she was certainly no Nellie Lovett, the human-pie-maker of “Sweeney Todd,” a performance that earned her the fourth of six Tony Awards, in 1979. But the woman in the slippers and robe was no Cora Hoover Hooper, the cartoon mayoress of “Anyone Can Whistle,” her first stage musical role, in 1964. “Just a cabbage,” she said.

Among other achievements, the actress, who died Tuesday at 96, inhabited some of most sensational roles in musical theater history — and did it ...

“What you have to accept with me is, I would do whatever interested me to attempt; it’s the feeling of, ‘I would love to pull that off,’ ” she recalled on that afternoon a dozen years ago. I only know her 1966 “Mame” from endless replays of her voice on the cast album, singing Jerry Herman’s buoyant tunes, and her 1974 ″Gypsy” from accounts by friends who saw it. [plus a lifetime achievement award](https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/06/12/tony-awards-2022-winners/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13) earlier this year), for the original “Mame” and “Dear World” and a beloved revival of “Gypsy.” Such were the rigors of booking a job in the good old days; it’s now rare for stars of her accomplishment to submit to auditions. “When I hear the recording, I think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ ” Lansbury observed that day, chuckling. The prospect of work still lit her up, as could memories of indelible triumphs like “Sweeney.” Her collaboration with Sondheim, who died 11 months ago at 91, ranged over peerless hits — “Sweeney Todd” is being revived on Broadway this season, with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford — and storied flops. She was both grandmotherly and girlish at the tender age of 85 and yet to perform what would be her final Broadway role, in 2012’s “The Best Man,” by Gore Vidal. Whether a role called for grit or grace, pluck or poise, Lansbury could summon qualities that led a show past exceptional and all the way to unforgettable. Not only had she been Angela Lansbury for so long, but she was also — always — the best Angela Lansbury any audience could hope for. Back in New York, Lansbury said, Sondheim sang “The Worst Pies” for her — a tricky song rhythmically, involving the syncopated exertions of kneading of the pie dough. Potts, but Broadway history claimed her far more centrally, as some of the most dazzlingly flamboyant characters in the musical-theater canon: Mame. Ageless Angela Lansbury may have been celebrated in television and movie culture as Jessica Fletcher and Mrs.

To understand her greatness, look no further than one of the silliest films she ever appeared in: 1971's Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Lansbury was quick to joke about the narrow pathways Hollywood found for her in her prime, but she also kept evolving past them, enduring decade after decade and resonating with different generations in different ways. Asked to take in three orphaned children, she’s reluctant at first but quickly bonds with them over their love of the magical arts she’s still learning. Released to mixed reviews, it was at best a modest success, but I watched it constantly on VHS as a child. A jury could debate for weeks over her greatest part and fail to arrive at a definitive answer. She was a chilling villain in The Manchurian Candidate, a flighty and flirty accomplice to the psychological torment of Gaslight, and a winsome tavern singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning an Oscar nomination for each role. Angela Lansbury was a boundlessly versatile performer, with a decades-long career filled with roles that played to her many strengths.

The actress, who died this week at ninety-six, revealed every facet of her talents.

While “Murder, She Wrote” made Lansbury a living-room fixture, “Beauty and the Beast” introduced her to a new generation of six-year-olds—and to every generation of six-year-olds that came after. But her range shouldn’t be forgotten: when she chose to be, she was a consummate villainess, a comedic sharpshooter, and a sequined show horse who could bring down the house. In “The Manchurian Candidate,” the next year, she was three years older than Laurence Harvey, the actor playing her son. In the later sixties and seventies, she was a brassy Broadway belter in “Mame” and “Gypsy.” (She won six Tony Awards, including one for lifetime achievement.) She was the unlikely star of a 1988 “I was always in makeup to play beastly women in their forties or fifties,” she complained. “Here was this ridiculous, rather naïve little woman who was mad about Sweeney Todd,” she [told John Lahr](https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/angela-lansbury), in 2009, “and who would have done anything in the world for him but was totally incapable of seeing right or wrong and went along with anything he suggested just to stay in with him.” She said it was her happiest experience on a stage. In the Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), she played a political puppet master who commands her own brainwashed son to “shoot the Presidential nominee through the head.” Her [performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZnaRMhD_A), which earned the last of her three Oscar nominations, still chills the bones—this ain’t no Mrs. She played Elvis Presley’s mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961), when he was twenty-six and she was thirty-six. When she [appeared](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdCzIrMEXw) in the last scene of “Mary Poppins Returns” (2018), as a sweet balloon seller, I burst into tears. She started playing mothers—usually bad ones—when she was twenty, and fell into a rut in the fifties. And she wedged herself—or at least her unmistakable voice—into children’s imaginations decade after decade, whether as a witch-in-training in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971), a corrupt sorceress in “The Last Unicorn” (1982), or a kindly teapot in “Beauty and the Beast” (1991). [saucy Cockney maid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNZwCDvXmFQ) in M-G-M’s “Gaslight”—she was seventeen when she landed the part—for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, one of three nominations she received before she was forty.

The long-time Broadway collaborators will both apparently show up as themselves in the Knives Out sequel.

This is [per Playbill](https://www.playbill.com/article/angela-lansbury-and-stephen-sondheim-will-make-posthumous-onscreen-appearances-in-knives-out-film-sequel), which reports that Netflix’s follow-up to Johnson’s star-studded mystery story will be the final screen credit for both Lansbury and her frequent collaborator Sondheim, who [died in November of 2021](https://www.avclub.com/r-i-p-stephen-sondheim-legendary-broadway-songwriter-1848125723). Lansbury, of course, was no stranger to theatrical murder, from her film debut in 1944's Gaslight onward; we can only hope that Murder She Wrote’s J.P. Details about the film’s plot are still being kept largely under wraps—it being a mystery story, and all that—but the Playbill report notes that Lansbury and Sondheim will both appear as themselves.

Angela Lansbury, Stephen Sondheim to Make Posthumous Cameos in Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. They're both playing themselves.

[Glass Onion’s trailer](https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/knives-out-2-glass-onion-trailer-release-date.html) shows that the film bears some plot similarities to The Last of Sheila, a star-studded mystery written by Sondheim and Psycho star Anthony Perkins. [Lansbury died October 11](https://www.vulture.com/2022/10/angela-lansbury-dead.html) at the age of 96, while Sondheim died in [November of 2021](https://www.vulture.com/2021/11/stephen-sondheim-died-91.html), around a month after Glass Onion: a Knives Out Mystery wrapped. As if the Knives Out sequel’s cast could get any more stacked,