Angela Lansbury

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.

The British-born actor produced indelible portraits of a wide range of characters from villainesses to sleuths and light comic roles in movies, on the stage ...

And I'm still here!" She holds the record for the most Golden Globe nominations and wins for best actress in a television drama series and the most Emmy nominations for lead actress in a drama series. Despite the long days — she left her home at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6:00 am and returned after dark — and reams of dialogue to memorise, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. 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. - She died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, according to a statement from her family - Her widest fame began in 1984 when she launched Murder, She Wrote

The British-born actor, who had a career that spanned eight decades, was a cousin of former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's mother, ...

Despite the long days — she left her home at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6am and returned after dark — and reams of dialogue to memorise, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. “You first dazzled me when I was 4 & you were Aunty Angela making a movie in Australia...Rest In Peace dear Angie.” 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 in the role. “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 created a dame in 2014.

Lansbury's acting career extended over an extraordinary seven decades. She says she knew early on that she'd never be "groomed to be a glamorous movie star" ...

"Being Jessica was second nature to me because she embodied all of the qualities that I like about women," Lansbury said. She told Fresh Air's Terry Gross that she was "happily trapped" in the role of Jessica Fletcher, the mystery novelist who solved a murder every week. That way of acting a song served Lansbury very well when she starred as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy, and as the cold-blooded Mrs. "And, lo and behold, when she walked down that staircase in gold-lamé pajamas, in 1966, she was 40 years old and Broadway embraced her in a way that it has embraced few actresses in its storied history." Lansbury got the acting bug as a teenager, playing Audrey in a student production of As You Like It. Angela Lansbury was destined to become an actress; born in London, England in 1925, her mother was a leading lady of the British stage.

Legendary British actress, Dame Angela Lansbury, has died aged 96 after an illustrious seven decade career, her family has confirmed.

For her TV contribution, Lansbury had an impressive 18 Emmy nominations, 12 of which for Murder, She Wrote, in which she starred from 1984. She defined the essence of being a legend. Thank you Angela for the joy & love you have shared with all the world all your life. Lansbury’s stage and screen career began when she was just 17, starring as the cockney maid in the Ingrid Bergman-Charles Boyer classic 1944 thriller Gaslight. Many will also remember her from their childhood, as the voice of Disney’s Mrs. today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” her family said in a statement obtained by

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.

Angela Lansbury, the big-eyed, scene-stealing British actor who kicked up her heels in the Broadway musicals Mame and Gypsy and solved endless murders as ...

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. CBS and the production company, Universal Studio, agreed, especially since Murder, She Wrote had become a Sunday night hit. Please click below to help InDaily continue to uncover the facts. “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 had achieved notice as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth. Her mature demeanour prompted producers to cast her much older than her actual age.

Best known as the novelist-sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury's winning charm and towering talent stretches all the way back to the days ...

It amused Lansbury that she was a rare actor who would need to ‘age down’ to play the elderly matriarch, Mrs St Maugham. Perhaps appropriately, as the play was about seances, Lansbury told an interviewer that she felt her mother’s presence in the building. However, she subsequently had doubts about sustaining the stamina to play eight performances a week. In 1966, Lansbury was an unexpected casting for the musical Mame, in the lead role of an eccentric socialite during the Depression. Her career as best-selling crime writer JB Fletcher is launched, with a sideline as an amateur sleuth, solving murders that occur near her home, or in other locations (New York, Los Angeles, Hawaii) to which she has gone on book tours, or speaking engagements. Murder, She Wrote became something of a family business, with Lansbury’s second husband, Peter Shaw, and their son, Anthony, producing or directing many episodes. For the part, she lightly Americanised an accent that remained audibly English off-screen throughout her life. Cast in that on his recommendation, she was signed to a seven-year contract with MGM. She won five Tony awards, and continued to appear on Broadway and in the London West End until her 10th decade. Despite Oscar nominations for both Gaslight and her next film, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lansbury never quite achieved the Hollywood career that seemed promised. Contradicting the common training of actors to channel their own emotional history into roles, she counselled: “Leave who you are at home ... Her movie career stretched from Gaslight in 1944 to the 2018 children’s films, Buttons and Mary Poppins Returns.

The British-born actor, who had a career that spanned eight decades, was a cousin of former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull's mother, ...

Despite the long days — she left her home at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6am and returned after dark — and reams of dialogue to memorise, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. “You first dazzled me when I was 4 & you were Aunty Angela making a movie in Australia...Rest In Peace dear Angie.” 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 in the role. “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 created a dame in 2014.

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”.

Actor Angela Lansbury, most famous for her role as Jessica Fletcher in the US television series “Murder, She Wrote”, has died, aged 96.

In an interview in 2019 with US magazine “Parade”, she said she had no plans to retire. Her first breakthrough occurred in 1944, when she played opposite Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s “Gaslight.” Lansbury was born in London in 1925 to actor Moyna Macgill and politician, Edgar Lansbury. The actor, whose 75-year career stretched across the big screen, musical theatre and television, died at her home in Los Angeles. “Yes, I do [think about it] on some days. Lansbury’s other significant role was the voice of Mrs Potts in the 1991 Disney film “Beauty and the Beast”.