ANGELA LANSBURY
(16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022)
For some eighty years or so, Angela Lansbury enjoyed great success in films, on stage and, on television, in the long-running series Murder, She Wrote. She appeared in over a hundred films and TV shows, stage productions, radio shows and even produced her own exercise video and book. Sadly, she died just a few days before her ninety-seventh birthday. She was the winner of six Tonys, six Golden Globes, an Honorary Academy Award, three Oscar nominations, 18 Prime Time Emmys, a Grammy, a Bafta Lifetime Achievement award, and an Olivier award. She was made a dame of the British Empire in 2014.
Angela Lansbury was born in London to Irish-American parents, the daughter of the Irish actress Moyna MacGill and the English politician Edgar Lansbury who died when Angela was nine. Mainly self-educated, the budding actress studied music and attended the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art. During World War II, Angela’s mother arranged for her and many other children to be evacuated to Canada and subsequently New York where Angela attended drama school. After touring with a company in Canada, she moved to Los Angeles with her mother.
When Angela met the playwright John Van Druten, who had written the screen adaptation of Patrick Hamilton’s play Gaslight (1944), he recommended her for the part of the maid Nancy. Securing her first Oscar nomination, she received a seven-year contract with MGM and went on to make National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor and The Picture of Dorian Gray with Hurd Hatfield, for which she won a Golden Globe and another Oscar nomination. In 1945, she was showcased as a Rising Star in this very publication. Oddly, MGM didn’t know what to do with her and never cast her in major roles. Nonetheless, she made headway in such musical films as The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland and in the Jerome Kern biopic Till the Clouds Roll By, plus such dramas as The Three Musketeers with Gene Kelly, State of the Union with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, and The Red Danube with Walter Pidgeon. On loan to United Artists, she did The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, and at Paramount she was Semadar in DeMille’s Samson and Delilah.
She proved her comedic talents with Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1956) and in Vincente Minnelli's The Reluctant Debutante (1958) and her dramatic nous in the William Faulkner adaptation of The Long Hot Summer in the same year. More drama came with Delbert Mann’s The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, in which she played Laurence Harvey’s mother, even though she was only three years older than him. For the latter, she received a third Oscar nomination, for what was her best dramatic film role. Later films included Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, the Agatha Christie mysteries Death on the Nile and The Mirror Crack'd (as Miss Marple), plus a remake of The Lady Vanishes (as Miss Froy). She was also the voice of Mrs Potts, a singing teapot, in the Disney cartoon Beauty and the Beast. Her last film, Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery, in which she plays herself, is due for release in November 2022.
Angela Lansbury’s stage career first encompassed Hotel Paradiso and A Taste of Honey, before her musical debut in Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle (1964) which ran for nine performances, when in 1966 she stormed her way to Broadway success in Jerry Herman’s long-running Mame, for which she won her first Tony. Herman’s Dear World, based on The Madwoman of Chaillot, had only a short run, but nonetheless secured her a second Tony. In London she was Mama Rose in Jule Styne and Sondheim’s Gypsy and toured the US with it. In 1979 she created the musical role of Nellie Lovett in Sondheim’s masterpiece Sweeney Todd. She did other stage work for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National Theatre, played Mrs Anna in The King and I and returned to Broadway for Terrence McNally's Deuce, played Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (another Tony), and Madame Armfeldt in Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.
Perhaps the part that most will know her for is Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote which ran on television from 1984 to 2003. Jessica was a retired teacher and mystery writer who was also an amateur detective. The part suited the actress down to the ground and because of that alone she became a worldwide star.
Angela Lansbury was first married to the artist, decorator and actor Richard Cromwell in 1945, but they divorced the following year because he was gay, although they stayed friends until his death in 2003. In 1949 she married the actor and producer Peter Shaw and they have two children, Anthony and Deirdre, as well as Shaw’s son David from his first marriage.
MICHAEL DARVELL