Angela Lansbury

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).

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”.

LOS ANGELES, Oct 12 — Actress Angela Lansbury, who became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in Murder, She Wrote, died yesterday, ...

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. 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. In the 1961 musical comedy Blue Hawaii, for example, she was the mother of a dashing tour guide played by Elvis Presley, who was only 10 years her junior.

(Oct 12): 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.

Angela Lansbury, who enjoyed an eclectic, award-winning movie and stage career in addition to becoming America's favorite TV sleuth in "Murder, She Wrote," ...

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.

Film-maker Neil Jordan cast Angela Lansbury in his exotic horror folk-tale The Company of Wolves, released in 1984. Here he remembers working with an actor ...

I saw her years later at a reception in Dublin and was surprised at how moving it was. We had crew members who had just come off The Empire Strikes Back and regarded what we were doing with a kind of benign contempt or bemusement. There were trees covered in the musculature of humans, glistening with dark, tacky red; there was the root of a massive oak or elm shaped like an elegant high-heel; there were lifesize teddy bears that groped maids of honour; there was an entire wedding party of overdressed wolves (dogs, actually, powdered malamutes); there was a wolf that came out of a huntsman’s mouth.

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.

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.

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.

The late Angela Lansbury may have been best known for Murder, She Wrote and Beauty And The Beast, but that just scratches the surface of her rich, ...

The A.V. She was an adventurous actress who never shied from fitting herself into a dizzying assortment of characters. Yet while her talents were deeply respected and earned her an assortment of accolades, it was her late-life TV role as Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher—in tone and manner likely the closest to Lansbury’s actual persona—that made her a genuine icon.

STAGE and silver screen star Angela Lansbury died peacefully in her sleep at her Los Angeles home on Tuesday. The 96-year-old was best known to TV aud...

Lansbury eventually became an executive producer on the series. In 2014, she was awarded an Honorary Oscar to celebrate her seven-decade film career. The 96-year-old was best known to TV audiences as mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote.

If you're in need of the comfort of Mrs. Potts or the shrewdness of Jessica Fletcher after the death of Angela Lansbury, here's where you can find them.

In her screen debut, Lansbury established herself as a force to be reckoned with as forthright young maid Nancy Oliver in this psychological thriller from George Kukor. Later in her storied career, she emerged as one of Hollywood's most beloved figures, providing comfort to millions of tiny tots as Mrs. One of the last remaining stars of her generation, Lansbury started her career as a screen siren in Hollywood's studio era, earning Oscar nominations for her work in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), before the Tony awards—of which she'd go on to win six—were even invented.

Legendary actress Angela Lansbury sent chills down our spines as a maniacal matriarch in The Manchurian Candidate.

It's not often that viewers cheer the killing of a mother on film, but Lansbury's precision in capturing the pure vileness and immorality of a woman literally driven to madness in the pursuit of supremacy made viewers wish for nothing more than Elizabeth's deservedly violent demise. And although Lansbury turned in hundreds of memorable performances in her long career, it's her terrifying turn in The Manchurian Candidate that remains iconic. Then, in a startlingly disturbing moment, Eleanor kisses Raymond — not on the forehead, not on the cheek, but squarely on the lips in a lingering exhibition of passion. "You will shoot the presidential nominee through the head," Eleanor instructs Raymond without an ounce of hesitation, then goes on to detail the dramatic events that will follow and that will secure her husband's place as an American hero. Lansbury is so precise in bringing Eleanor's worst qualities to the forefront that with every moment she's on the screen, the audience's contempt for her boils like liquid in a pot. Though she utters not a word of dialogue in the scene, viewers can feel Eleanor's sense of desperation, knowing that her twisted visions are just moments from being realized. Except for Janet Leigh, of course.” While lighting and makeup may have helped add some years to her face in the film, it was Lansbury's ability to embody Eleanor's fully depraved presence that made her so believable as a woman on the tail end of middle age, coarsened by a life singularly fueled by the lust for power and revenge. At times humorous in her stinging emasculation of Johnny, Eleanor is more often disturbing as a woman clearly lacking a moral compass. Barking orders and speaking at the velocity of a ticker tape machine operating at full tilt, it's immediately clear that Eleanor is a woman in charge. For starters, at the time, she was best known for her performances in tony literary dramas like 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray and 1948's The Three Musketeers. "I was just beginning to do big drama, so put my faith in Frankenheimer and that marvelous script by George Axelrod based on Richard Condon’s novel, which I had read.” Still, reflecting on her decision to take the part, she said "it was pretty foolhardy." Senator (James Gregory) and mother of Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), a former Korean War prisoner struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome, Lansbury became one of the most frightening and detestable mother figures in the history of cinema.

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.