Angela Lansbury, acclaimed actress of TV, film and Broadway, has died at 96
Angela Lansbury, who became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in the hit TV show Murder, She Wrote, has died, aged 96.
Angela Lansbury, an actress whose career spanned more than 60 years and included legendary performances as diverse as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd” and Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote,” has died. She was 96 years old.
Since her big-screen debut in 1944, Lansbury became known to several generations for iconic performances in film and television and on Broadway, with each role more disparate than the last.
She was the Machiavellian mother in The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 and the outlandish aunt in Mame on Broadway just a few years later.
With a singsong voice that seemed to be perpetually reciting a lullaby, Lansbury endeared herself to younger moviegoers as the voice of Mrs. Potts, the maternal teapot watching romance unfold in the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast.
Discovered as a teenager during World War II, Lansbury continued working well into her senior years. She appeared in Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns in 2018, and in 2015 appeared on the West End stage in a production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, for which she won an Olivier Award for best actress in a supporting role.
Accepting the award, Ms. Lansbury made note of a career that had begun in war-ravaged Europe and extended to her being commended by the queen as a dame.
“When I think of how I started in London...in a lovely play. I can’t even remember the title,” she said to a standing ovation. “I can’t remember a lot of things these days, except I can remember my lines.” Ms. Lansbury was born in England on Oct. 16, 1925, to a family well-versed in British arts and politics. Her mother was an actress who had performed alongside John Gielgud, and her father -- a politician himself -- was a friend of Mahatma Gandhi and a son of a Labour Party leader.
Ms. Lansbury began acting as a child, drawn to the land of make-believe after her father’s death when she was 9 years old. When German aircraft began bombing London during the Blitz, she and her family left for the U.S., arriving in New York in 1940.
Acting school and a move to Los Angeles followed. Though she would eventually become an actress with looks and a bearing unlike any other leading star, in those days Ms. Lansbury was a dime-a-dozen aspiring actress, making do on $28-a-week department-store wages.
Thank you Angela for the joy & love you have shared with all the world all your life. You first dazzled me when I was 4 & you were Aunty Angela making a movie in Australia. In later years we always had politics & showbiz to talk and laugh about. Rest In Peace dear Angie. https://t.co/DOKRcn0hw9
— Malcolm Turnbull (@TurnbullMalcolm) October 11, 2022
She caught a lucky break when she was cast in an adaptation of the play “Gaslight,” a drama about a husband slowly and deliberately driving his wife crazy. Ms. Lansbury, then 18 years old, was nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as the couple’s maid; a second nomination soon followed for 1945’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. signed her to a $500-a-week contract, putting her into the Hollywood studio system alongside contemporaries such as Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland. But that auspicious start was soon damped by typecasting: Ms. Lansbury was routinely relegated to unremarkable supporting parts or characters who were much older than she was in real life.
“Bitches on wheels and people’s mothers,” was how she characterized the roles. When she was cast in “The Manchurian Candidate,” she was only three years older than the actor playing her son. It nonetheless became one of her most popular performances and earned her a third Oscar nomination.
But if her looks -- too mature for ingénue roles, too idiosyncratic for a leading lady -- kept her from Hollywood’s starring roles, they were an essential component to her wildly successful second chapter on stage.
She made her Broadway debut in 1957’s “Hotel Paradiso,” a farce about a playwright with writer’s block. In 1964 she starred in Stephen Sondheim’s “Anyone Can Whistle,” a lesser-known work that is likely best remembered for bringing Ms. Lansbury to Broadway musicals.
A torrent of classic roles followed. She played the title role in “Mame” in 1966, winning her first Tony Award for the performance. She won another for her performance in “Dear World” two years later.
In 1974, she won a third for playing Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” and then a fourth as Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd” five years later.
“Her songs, many of them rapid patter songs with awkward musical intervals; and having to be sung while doing five or ten other things at once, are awesomely difficult and she does them awesomely well,” critic Richard Eder said of her performance in “Sweeney Todd.” “Her face is a comic face; her eyes revolve three times to announce the arrival of an idea; but there is a blue sadness blinking behind them.”
Those four roles -- as the doting Auntie Mame, the eccentric Madwoman of Chaillot, a stage mom from hell and a woman who bakes humans into pies -- would make Ms. Lansbury a legend of the stage. When she won her fifth Tony for “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, it tied a record at the time for most competitive Tony wins. (Actress Audra McDonald set a record in 2014 with six.) In 1984, Ms. Lansbury began starring on TV in “Murder, She Wrote” as Jessica Fletcher, a crime novelist who solves crime in the picturesque hamlet of Cabot Cove, Maine, where there are a startling number of homicides. Ms. Lansbury, then in her 60s, was an unlikely leading lady, but the show was a hit and ran for 12 seasons. Ms. Lansbury starred in more than 260 episodes and was nominated for 12 Emmy Awards -- one for each season.
She was formally named a dame in 2014, when Queen Elizabeth named her a Commander of the British Empire. In 2000, she was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor.
Her public persona was always the kindhearted aunt or grandmother, but Ms. Lansbury’s personal life intersected with a dark period in U.S. history. In the 1960s, her daughter became friends with cult leader Charles Manson and people who were known as his followers, some of whom would later be convicted in a string of murders in Southern California. Ms. Lansbury’s daughter, Deirdre Shaw, used her mother’s credit cards to buy clothes for the group.
Ms. Lansbury was briefly married to Richard Cromwell, an actor who later came out as gay. While at MGM, she met Peter Shaw, an Army veteran who would become an agent representing stars such as Katharine Hepburn. They were married from 1949 until his death in 2003.
Though she is featured on original-cast recordings singing classics such as “Everything’s Coming Up Roses,” Ms. Lansbury’s best-known recording might be the title song from “Beauty and the Beast.” In the recording booth, Ms. Lansbury’s years of Broadway experience immediately shone through. She sang the song -- and nailed it in the first take.
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