Angela Lansbury

Lansbury was a versatile actor who wowed generations of fans as a murderous baker, a singing teapot, a Soviet spy and a small-town sleuth among a host of ...

[told the TV academy](https://interviews.televisionacademy.com/interviews/angela-lansbury?clip=54009#interview-clips). Under the old studio system, MGM controlled her work and cast the young actor in roles that Lansbury said she had no business playing. She was preceded in death by her husband of 53 years, Peter Shaw. “We certainly didn’t envision the longevity” of the Cold War-era thriller, Lansbury said in 1998. She scored her first professional gig at the Samovar Club in Montreal. [she said in 2013 while receiving an honorary Academy Award](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-qk2itNfzU). “We felt because of the extraordinary subject matter and the way in which the plot was devised, it was so extraordinary that it was going to either sink or swim. The book was Richard Condon’s “The Manchurian Candidate.” The term "So privileged I got to spend time with this incredible woman," he said in statement. [voiced the sentimental Mrs. She leaves behind a library of work to enjoy for many generations.

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.

LOS ANGELES (AFP) – Actress Angela Lansbury, who became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday, ...

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. But she continued to pick up roles in cinema, gaining a younger audience as the witch in the hit Disney film “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” in 1971. 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. She was 96.

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

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).

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.

Lansbury was also known for her films 'Gaslight,' 'The Long Hot Summer,' and 'All Fall Down'

In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, who became her manager and the father of her son, Anthony, and daughter, Deirdre. Lansbury studied drama and her movie career got off to a quick start. Lansbury, who lived in Los Angeles, married actor Richard Cromwell in 1945 but the union lasted less than a year. The series, which ran from 1984 to 1996, brought her 11 of her 18 Emmy nominations. “Not since the heyday of Bette Davis had there been an actress of this range and accomplishment,” wrote critic David Shipman. Academy Award winners Geoffrey Rush and Emma Thompson offered a tribute to Lansbury at the ceremony.

NEW YORK CITY: Angela Lansbury, the scene-stealing British actor who kicked up her heels in the Broadway musicals "Mame" and "Gypsy" and solved endless ...

In 2000, Lansbury withdrew from a planned Broadway musical, "The Visit," because she needed to help her husband recover from heart surgery. 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. Potts in "Beauty and the Beast" and sang the title song. Home is the counterweight to the work." "The only thing I ever had confidence in is my ability to perform," she said. 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. The tragedy forced her to become self-reliant and become, she later said, "almost a surrogate husband to my mother." "Murder, She Wrote" stayed high in the ratings through its 11th year. 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 for the same role. Audra McDonald tweeted: "She was an icon, a legend, a gem and about the nicest lady you'd ever want to meet." She was beloved as a person and an actress, and managed to be approachable, glamorous and heartbreaking. She was a key person in welcoming me to the community.

“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 a.m. today, Tuesday, ...

Her career on Broadway, television, and the movies spanned eight decades, one of the longest in showbiz, 16, Angela also became the voice of Mrs. today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” said her family in a statement.

The award for Sweeney Todd went to its composer/lyricist, Stephen Sondheim, as well as album producer Thomas Z. Shepard. Two of Lansbury's other cast albums – ...

(Lansbury would receive the same honor seven years later.) In 1976, “Send in the Clowns” won a Grammy for song of the year. [sang the song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1znyr0QQGE) to open the 1989 Tony Awards, which she hosted for the third year in a row. [This song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhCxyBpkJ6M) received an Oscar nomination for best original song, but lost to the groundbreaking funk smash “Theme From Shaft.” Lansbury probably sensed her old-fashioned tune wasn’t going to win that year. By 1987, Lansbury and Arthur were both starring in hit TV series (Murder, She Wrote and The Golden Girls, if you haven’t gone near a TV in a few decades). On the 1987 Tony Awards, which Lansbury hosted, she performed “Bosom Buddies,” another highlight from Mame, with her long-ago co-star, Bea Arthur (who had won a Tony for best featured actress in a musical). Lansbury’s spoken-sung performance was ideal for the conversational ballad, which brought songwriters Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman a well-deserved Oscar for best original song. At the 64th Academy Awards in 1992, she She hosted or co-hosted the Tony Awards five times, more often than anyone else, and hosted the Emmy Awards once (in 1993). She was inducted into the TV Academy Hall of Fame in 1996, received an honorary award from the Motion Picture Academy in 2013 and received a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement just this year. Among them: “Beauty and the Beast,” the title song from the 1991 Disney film of the same name, which won an Oscar for best original song and a Grammy for song of the year. Lansbury won four Tony Awards for best actress in a musical – which is still the record in that category – putting her ahead of fellow Broadway legends Mary Martin and Gwen Verdon, with three wins each. Impressively, Lansbury received career-capping honorary awards from three of the four EGOT awards shows.

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.

Ms. Lansbury, who played a crime-solving mystery writer in the long-running US television series Murder, She Wrote, “died peacefully in her sleep” at home in ...

The role brought Ms. In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, who became her manager and the father of her son, Anthony, and daughter, Deirdre. and The Mirror Crack’d (1980), in which she played Agatha Christie’s spinster sleuth Miss Marple, and the film musical The Pirates of Penzance (1983). Lansbury also performed on stage in England before returning to such films as Death on the Nile (1978), The Lady Vanishes (1979). In movies, Ms. She had an MGM contract and her first three movies were Gaslight, National Velvet, in which she played Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister, and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lansbury reached her broadest audience in Murder, She Wrote as retired English teacher-turned mystery writer Jessica Fletcher, who week after week found herself at the scene of a homicide. Rush lauded her as the “living definition of range,” while Ms. Lansbury during the filming of the 2005 comedy Nanny McPhee. Lansbury at the ceremony. Nearly seven decades after her first film, she was awarded an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement at age 88 in November 2013. Ms.

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.