Angela Lansbury - # 291

Angela Lansbury, Entrancing Star of Stage and Screen, Dies at 96

She played Mame and won five Tony Awards, received an honorary Oscar and starred for 12 seasons as Jessica Fletcher on 'Murder, She Wrote.'

 

She was number 291 on the list.

Angela Lansbury, the irrepressible three-time Oscar nominee and five-time Tony Award winner who solved 12 seasons’ worth of crimes as the novelist/amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on CBS’ Murder, She Wrote, has died. She was 96.

Lansbury, who received an Emmy nomination for best actress in a drama series for each and every season of Murder, She Wrote — yet never won — died in her sleep at 1:30 a.m. Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, her family announced. She was five days shy of her birthday.

Lansbury went 0-for-18 in career Emmy noms but did get some love from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who gave her an honorary Oscar in 2013 for her career as “an entertainment icon who has created some of cinema’s most memorable characters, inspiring generations of actors.”

The London-born Lansbury, then 19, received a best supporting actress Oscar nom for her very first film role, as the young maid Nancy in the home of Charles Boyer and his new bride Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).

For her third movie, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), she received another nom for playing the lovely singer whose heart is broken by the hedonistic title character. (Her mother, West End actress Moyna MacGill, played a duchess in the film.)

Lansbury then took a turn toward evil and was rewarded with her final Oscar nom for portraying Laurence Harvey’s manipulative mother in the Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The actress often played characters much older than herself, and in this case, Harvey was just a few years younger than Lansbury.

Her charismatic performance as the eccentric title character in a 1966 production of Mame vaulted her to Broadway superstardom and resulted in the first of her four Tonys for best actress in a musical.

She followed with wins for playing “the madwoman of Chaillot” in 1969’s Dear World, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman; for starring as the ultimate stage mother Rose in a 1974 revival of Gypsy; for dazzling as the off-the-wall Mrs. Lovett in the original 1979 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd; and, in 2009, for portraying the clairvoyant Madame Arcati in a revival of the Noël Coward farce Blithe Spirit.

She was still on the road in Blithe Spirit as she approached her 90th birthday, and in December 2018 she was back on the big screen, as the Balloon Lady, in Mary Poppins Returns.

In June, she received yet another Tony, this one for lifetime achievement.

In the early 1980s, Lansbury was not interested in headlining a TV series when she was approached by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link to star in Murder, She Wrote.

The pair earlier had created Ellery Queen, another show about a crime-solving writer, and former All in the Family star Jean Stapleton had already turned them down.

“I couldn’t imagine I would ever want to do television,” Lansbury said in a 1985 interview with The New York Times. “But the year 1983 rolled around and Broadway was not forthcoming, so I took a part in a miniseries, Gertrude Whitney in Little Gloria, Happy at Last [a dramatization of Gloria Vanderbilt‘s childhood].

“And then [there was] a slew of roles in miniseries, and I began to sense that the television audience was very receptive to me, and I decided I should stop flirting and shut the door or say to my agents, ‘I’m ready to think series.'”

Then 59, Lansbury signed on as the widowed Jessica, a retired English teacher, mystery writer and amateur detective who enjoyed riding her bicycle (she didn’t drive) in the cozy coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine. Late in the series, Jessica spent time teaching criminology at a Manhattan university.

Universal Television’s Murder, She Wrote ran from 1984-96 (plus four telefilms) and was a huge ratings hit on Sunday nights following 60 Minutes. Both CBS shows appealed to intelligent, older viewers, and Lansbury was the rare woman in the history of television to carry her own series.

The show went 0 for 3 in the Emmy race for outstanding drama series and won just twice in 41 tries overall, according to IMDb.

“Nobody in this town watches Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury, referring to the TV industry, said in 1991. “Only the public watches.”

The show was ranked in the top 13 in the Nielsen ratings (and as high as No. 4) on Sundays in its first 11 seasons but plummeted to No. 58 when CBS moved it to Thursdays in 1995-96 against NBC’s then-powerful lineup. The series finale, quite appropriately, was titled “Death by Demographics.”

“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” she said, “is that I could do what I do best and [play someone I have had] little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman. Mostly, I’ve played very spectacular bitches. Jessica has extreme sincerity, compassion, extraordinary intuition. I’m not like her. My imagination runs riot. I’m not a pragmatist. Jessica is.”

During the course of 12 seasons, Jessica solved some 300 murders — and still had time to write more than 30 books!

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born Oct. 16, 1925, in London to a timber-merchant father and an actress mother, a star of the English stage. She participated in school plays at Hampstead School for Girls and studied for a year at drama school, passing with honors at the Royal Academy of Music.

With the outbreak of World War II, she, her mother and her younger twin brothers, Bruce and Edgar, moved to the U.S. (Her father had died when she was 9; her half-sister stayed behind and married actor Peter Ustinov in 1940.)

The blue-eyed Lansbury attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York City and graduated in 1942. Although still in her mid-teens, she auditioned for nightclub appearances, and her songs and imitations of comic actress Beatrice Lillie won her an offer from the Samovar Club in Montreal. She fibbed about her age and got a six-week engagement.

Her mother, who had wound up in Hollywood at the end of the war, brought her daughter to California, and the 18-year-old was signed by MGM and given the role in Gaslight. She then appeared in National Velvet (1944) with Elizabeth Taylor but spent much of the next several years stuck in small parts at the studio.

“I ended up playing some of the most ridiculous roles at MGM,” she said.

But Lansbury found a home in the theater. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 in the farce Hotel Paradiso, and her first musical came with the 1964 Sondheim production Anyone Can Whistle.

On the big screen, Lansbury also was memorable as Elvis Presley’s mom in Blue Hawaii (1961), as a cold-hearted parent in The World of Henry Orient (1964), as the English witch Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and as the teapot Mrs. Potts in the animated Beauty and the Beast (1991).

Warming up for her Murder, She Wrote stint, Lansbury starred in two Agatha Christie projects: as a novelist in Death on the Nile (1978) and as the spinster sleuth Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d (1980).

When she was 19, she wed actor Richard Cromwell, then 37, but the marriage lasted less than a year, and she later discovered he was gay. In 1949, she wed British agent and producer Peter Shaw, and they were together until his death in 2003. They had two children, Anthony and Deirdre.

In 1971, after her house burned to the ground in Malibu, the family moved to a farmhouse in Cork, Ireland, and stayed there for a decade. She said that saved her kids from succumbing to drugs.

Her brothers also went on to show business careers, with Edgar working as an art director and producer and Bruce, who died in February 2017, serving as a producer on Murder, She Wrote; The Wild Wild West; Wonder Woman; and other shows.

In addition to Edgar, Anthony and Deirdre, survivors include another son, David; grandchildren Peter, Katherine and Ian; and five great-grandchildren. A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.

Film

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1944      Gaslight                Nancy Oliver      

National Velvet Edwina Brown  

1945      The Picture of Dorian Gray           Sibyl Vane          

1946      The Harvey Girls               Em         

The Hoodlum Saint          Dusty Millard    

Till the Clouds Roll By     London Specialty             

1947      The Private Affairs of Bel Ami      Clotilde de Marelle         

If Winter Comes                Mabel Sabre      

1948      State of the Union            Kay Thorndyke

The Three Musketeers   Queen Anne of France  

Tenth Avenue Angel       Susan Bratten   

1949      The Red Danube               Audrey Quail     

Samson and Delilah         Semadar             

1951      Kind Lady             Mrs. Nathalie Edwards  

1952      Mutiny Leslie    

1953      Remains to Be Seen        Valeska Chauvel               

1954      A Life at Stake    Doris Hillman    

1955      The Purple Mask               Madame Valentine         

A Lawless Street               Tally Dickinsen  

1956      The Court Jester               Princess Gwendolyn      

Please Murder Me           Myra Leeds        

1958      The Long, Hot Summer Minnie Littlejohn             

The Reluctant Debutante              Mabel Claremont            

1959      Summer of the Seventeenth Doll               Pearl     

1960      The Dark at the Top of the Stairs                Mavis Pruitt       

A Breath of Scandal         Countess Lina   

1961      Blue Hawaii        Sarah Lee Gates               

1962      The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse    Marguerite Laurier          Voice (uncredited)[1]

All Fall Down      Annabell Willart               

The Manchurian Candidate          Mrs. Nadia Iselin              

1963      In the Cool of the Day     Sybil Logan         

1964      The World of Henry Orient           Isabel Boyd        

Dear Heart          Phyllis  

1965      The Greatest Story Ever Told       Claudia Procula

The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders            Lady Blystone   

Harlow Mama Jean Bello             

1966      Mister Buddwing              Gloria   

1970      Something for Everyone                Countess Herthe von Ornstein   

1971      Bedknobs and Broomsticks          Miss Eglantine Price       

1978      Death on the Nile             Salome Otterbourne      

1979      The Lady Vanishes           Miss Froy            

1980      The Mirror Crack'd           Miss Jane Marple            

1982      The Last Unicorn               Mommy Fortuna              Voice

1983      The Pirates of Penzance                Ruth     

1984      The Company of Wolves                Granny

1991      Beauty and the Beast      Mrs. Potts           Voice

1997      Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas                 Voice; Direct-to-Video

Anastasia             Narrator/Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna   Voice

2000      Fantasia 2000    Herself (Introductory hostess)    The Firebird segment

2001      Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse   Mrs. Potts

2003      Broadway: The Golden Age          Herself (Interview)          Documentary

2005      Nanny McPhee Great Aunt Adelaide      

2008      Heidi 4 Paws       Grandmamma Sesehound            Voice

2011      Mr. Popper's Penguins   Mrs. Selma Van Gundy  

2013      Justin and the Knights of Valour                 The Witch            Voice

2014      Driving Miss Daisy            Miss Daisy Werthan        Theatrical release of Australian stage production

2018      The Grinch          Mayor McGerkle              Voice

Mary Poppins Returns    Balloon Lady      

Buttons: A Christmas Tale             Rose     

2022      Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery[2]     Herself Final film role

Television

Year       Title       Role       Notes

1950–1953          Robert Montgomery Presents    Rosie / Christine Manson              2 episodes

1950–1954          Lux Video Theatre            Various                 4 episodes

1953      The Revlon Mirror Theater           Joan Dexter        Episode: "Dreams Never Lie"

Ford Television Theatre Lola Walker        Episode: "The Ming Lama"

Schlitz Playhouse of Stars              Florie     Episode: "Storm Swept"

1954      Your Show of Shows       Herself - Guest Host        Episode #5.15

General Electric True Theater      Daphne Rutledge             Episode: "The Crime of Daphne Rutledge"

1954–1955          Four Star Playhouse        Mrs. Bellatrix Hallerton / Joan Robinson                 2 episodes

1955      Fireside Theatre                Brenda Jarvis      Episode: "The Indiscreet Mrs. Jarvis"

Stage 7 Vanessa Peters Episode: "Billy and the Bride"

The Star and the Story    Mrs. Jane Pritchard         Episode: "The Treasure"

1955–1956          Celebrity Playhouse        Deborah               2 episodes

1956      Chevron Hall of Stars      Laura Ellsworth Episode: "Crisis in Kansas"

The Star and the Story    Mrs. Jane Pritchard         Episode: "The Force of Circumstance"

Front Row Center             Joyce     Episode: "Instant of Truth"

Screen Directors Playhouse         Vera Wayne        Episode: "Claire"

Studio 57             Flossie Norris / Katy        2 episodes

1956–1957          Climax! Judith Beresford / Justina             2 episodes

1957      Undercurrent    Deborah               Episode: "Deborah"

1958–1959          Playhouse 90     Hazel Wills / Victoria Atkins         2 episodes

1963      The Eleventh Hour           Alvera Dunlear Episode: "Something Crazy's Going on in the Back Room"

1965      The Man from U.N.C.L.E.              Elfie von Donck Episode: "The Deadly Toys Affair"

The Trials of O'Brien        Celeste Thurlow                Episode: "Leave It to Me"

1975      The First Christmas          Sister Theresa / Narrator (voice)                Television special

1982      Sweeney Todd:

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street             Nellie Lovett       Filmed performance shown on PBS

Little Gloria... Happy at Last         Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney     Television mini-series

1983      The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story           Amanda Fenwick              Television film

1984      The First Olympics: Athens 1896                Alice Garrett       Television mini-series

A Talent for Murder        Ann Royce McClain          Television film

Lace       Aunt Hortense Boutin     Television mini-series

1984–1996          Murder, She Wrote         Jessica Fletcher Regular role, 264 episodes

1986      Magnum, P.I.     Episode: "Novel Connection"

Rage of Angels: The Story Continues        Marchesa Allabrandi       Television film

1988      Shootdown         Nan Moore

1989      The Shell Seekers             Penelope Keeling

1990      The Love She Sought       Agatha McGee Television film (alternate title: A Green Journey)

1992      Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris                Mrs. Ada Harris Television film

1996      Mrs. Santa Claus               Mrs. Santa Claus

1997      Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest               Jessica Fletcher

1999      The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax     Mrs. Emily Pollifax

2000      Murder, She Wrote: A Story to Die For    Jessica Fletcher

2001      Murder, She Wrote: The Last Free Man

2002      Touched by an Angel      Lady Berrington                Episode: "For All the Tea in China"

2003      Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle      Jessica Fletcher Television film

2004      The Blackwater Lightship              Dora Devereux

2005      Law & Order: Special Victims Unit             Eleanor Duvall   Episode: "Night"

Law & Order: Trial by Jury             Episode: "Day"

2015      Great Performances: Driving Miss Daisy Miss Daisy Werthan        Filmed performance shown in Theaters and on PBS

2017      Little Women     Aunt March        Television mini-series, 3 episodes

 

Stage

Year       Title       Role       Theatre Venue Ref(s)

1957      Hotel Paradiso   Marcelle (Madame Cot)                Henry Miller's Theatre, Broadway            

1960–1961          A Taste of Honey              Helen    Lyceum Theatre, Broadway         

1964      Anyone Can Whistle        Cora Hoover Hooper       Majestic Theatre, Broadway       

1966–1968          Mame   Mame Dennis    Winter Garden Theatre, Broadway          

1969      Dear World         Countess Aurelia              Mark Hellinger Theatre, Broadway          

1971      Prettybelle          Prettybelle Sweet            Boch Center, Boston      

1972      All Over                The Mistress      Aldwych Theatre, London            

1973–1975          Gypsy    Rose      Piccadilly Theatre, London

Winter Garden Theatre, Broadway          

1975–1976          Hamlet Gertrude             National Theatre, London            

1978      The King and I    Anna Leonowens             Uris Theatre, Broadway

1979–1981          Sweeney Todd:

The Demon Barber of Fleet Street             Mrs. Nellie Lovett             Uris Theatre, Broadway

U.S. Tour             

1982      A Little Family Business Lillian Ridley       Ahmanson Theatre, Los Angeles

Martin Beck Theatre, Broadway                 [10]

1983      Mame   Mame Dennis    Gershwin Theatre, Broadway     

2007      Deuce   Leona Mullen     Music Box Theatre, Broadway    

2009      Blithe Spirit         Madame Arcati Shubert Theatre, Broadway        

2009–2010          A Little Night Music         Madame Armfeldt           Walter Kerr Theatre, Broadway

2012      The Best Man     Mrs. Sue-Ellen Gamadge               Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, Broadway   

2013      Driving Miss Daisy            Miss Daisy Werthan        Australian Tour

2014–2015          Blithe Spirit         Madame Arcati Gielgud Theatre, London

North American Tour     

2017      The Chalk Garden             Mrs. St. Maugham           Stage Reading

Hunter College, New York City   

2019      The Importance of Being Earnest               Lady Bracknell   Stage Reading

American Airlines Theatre, Broadway     

Radio

Year       Program               Episode                Notes

1947      Suspense             "A Thing of Beauty"        

1952      Theatre Guild on the Air                "Dear Brutus"   

Video games

Year       Title       Role       Notes

2006      Kingdom Hearts II             Mrs. Potts           Voice-over