Remembering Dame Angela Lansbury

A statement was released earlier this evening, UK time, announcing the passing of the actress best-known to millions of television viewers as Jessica Fletcher in the crime drama Murder She Wrote.

“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 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday.” – Family Statement

Born on the 16th of October, 1925 in central London, she was the child of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. The early years of her life were spent with her family in various areas in London and the south of England, however her idyllic childhood was brought early tragedy in 1935 when her father died of stomach cancer.

According to IMDB ‘Angela retreated into “playing characters”, as a coping mechanism to deal with the loss.’ Her mother however eventually found love again and became engaged to Leckie Forbes, a Scottish colonel. The new family moved into his London home.

While a student at South Hampstead High School, from 1934 to 1939, she became interested in the dramas of the silver screen. A popular hobby was visiting the local picture house. It was during these visits to the cinema that Angela pictured herself as an actress in various big screen roles.

In 1940 she took steps into the world of showbiz, having already learned to dance and play the piano, enrolling at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art, located in Kensington, West London. Her stage debut came in the in-house production of Mary of Scotland by Maxwell Anderson.

With the Second World War becoming more dangerous to Londoners, her mother moved to the United States to escape the Blitz, taking her three youngest children with her. The eldest was already married and remained in Britain. Lansbury was interested in continuing her studies, and joined the Feagin School of Dramatic Art, located in New York City. She appeared several productions at the school.

Angela in 1951 movie Kind Lady / MGM

In 1942 she joined her mother in a theatrical tour of Canada. 16-year-old Lansbury secured her first paying job in Montreal, singing at the nightspot Samovar Club having lied about her age claiming to be 19 in order to be hired. Later that year the family relocated to LA where hopes of movie stardom for mother and maybe daughter could flourish. Through her mother, Lansbury was introduced to screenwriter John Van Druten who had recently completed his script of Gaslight. He suggested that young Lansbury would be perfect for the role of Nancy Oliver, the film’s conniving cockney maid. This helped secure Lansbury’s first film role at the age of 17, and a seven-year contract with the film studio Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

In 1945, Lansbury married actor Richard Cromwell (1910-1960), who was 15 years older than she, it ended in divorce in 1946 although they remained friends. Angela remarried in 1949 to actor Peter Shaw. In 1951, both Lansbury and Shaw became naturalised citizens of the United States, while retaining their British citizenship.

During this time Angela appeared in eleven MGM films while also occasionally ‘loaned’ to other studios such as Paramount Pictures and United Artists. She also moved into other mediums of drama, first on the radio in 1948 and then two years later on television. At the end of her movie contract, she ventured onto the stage and as a freelance movie and television performer.

In 1957, Lansbury made her Broadway debut in a performance of Hotel Paradiso. Her best-known Broadway role came in 1966 with the musical Mame with Angela in the lead role of Aunty Mame Dennis. The musical received critical and patron praise, and Lansbury won her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. This production made her a ‘name’ stateside.

IMDB note that ‘Her newfound fame led to other high-profile appearances by Lansbury. She starred in a musical performance at the 1968 Academy Awards ceremony and co-hosted the 1968 Tony Awards. The Hasty Pudding Club is a social club for Harvard students they elected her “Woman of the Year” in 1968.’

Her name was made in the UK when she was cast in the starring role of benevolent witch Eglantine Price in Disney’s fantasy film Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Just like Mame had done in America, in the UK, Angela was found to be in demand following this box office hit.

During the 1970s across the UK she starred in several major theatre productions in the West End, also with the Royal Shakespeare Company and in musicals such as 1973’s Gypsy as overbearing mother Rose. After a year the show moved to the state and she gave her Rose to audiences in the United States as it toured the country. For her role, Lansbury won the Sarah Siddons Award and her third Tony Award. The musical had its second tour in 1975, the same year her mother Moyna died aged 79.

Murder She Wrote / Universal

Several other theatre, television and movie parts followed until her next major hit – which became her most famous role – arrived in 1984. As Jessica Fletcher in the detective series Murder, She Wrote she would be seen on screen in new episodes across its twelve-year run. Even after it ended production, it remained a regular on TV channels around the world in reruns. There were also a number of extended ‘TV movie’ versions made between 1997 and 2003.

Mystery novel writer Jessica, from Maine, would find herself in each episode at the centre of an actual murder, which thanks to her many crime novels would often beat the police – or even prove them wrong – to the culprit of the crime. Fletcher has been compared to the UK’s Miss Marple as it follows a similar “whodunit” format with little in the way of over-the-top violence or gore featuring, making it an easy show to screen at any time of the day.

In the 1990s she returned to the big screen as Mrs. Potts in Disney’s animated fantasy film Beauty and the Beast. Lansbury performed the film’s title song, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, the Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and the Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media.

In later years Angela was a regular back on the stage, never retiring from performing. In 2015, Lansbury received her first Olivier Award for Best Supporting Actress. At age 89, she was among the oldest first-time winners. Also in 2015, November 2015 was awarded the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.