Angela Lansbury was destined to become an actress; Born in London, England, in 1925, her mother was one of the protagonists of the British scene. Although Lansbury was best known for her role as Jessica Fletcher on CBS’s long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote, she had a distinguished career in film and on Broadway.
Lansbury died Tuesday in Los Angeles at the age of 96, according to a family statement. No cause of death was mentioned.
Lansbury got the acting bug as a teenager, playing Audrey in a student production of As You Like It. Appearing onstage was intoxicating, she told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross in 2000: “I suddenly got the feel and the smell of being able to make an effect by the way I played the role, the way I comported myself, all of the physical aspects of acting suddenly came to me and I got a laugh, you know, the first time I did it.”
As the Battle of Britain raged, Lansbury and her mother moved to the United States in 1940 and settled in Hollywood two years later. She got her first film role at the age of 17 as cheeky housekeeper Nancy in Gaslight, directed by George Cukor.
Lansbury was nominated for an Oscar for her performance Gaslight and appeared in numerous other films, from The Picture of Dorian Gray to The Harvey Girls, often playing women much older than she actually was.
“I was never going to play the girl next door, and I was never going to be prepared to be a glamorous movie star, and I realized that, so at that point I had to make peace with myself,” she says. she said.
Perhaps the most memorable portrayal of her in Hollywood was that of Laurence Harvey’s evil brainwashed mother in The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.
Lansbury moved to New York to act on Broadway and landed a major triumph in 1966 in Jerry Herman’s Mame, says theater historian Laurence Maslon.
“Angela Lansbury really threw herself in front of the bus to get that part.” Maslon says. “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 said she was a bit surprised to find a real home in musical theater.
“I’m not really a singer,” she admitted. “I have a serviceable voice, but how I use it — it’s the emotion under the note that sells the song.”
That singing served Lansbury very well when she starred as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy and the cold-blooded Mrs. Lovett, who cooks people in meat pies, in Stephen Sondheim’s 1979 masterpiece. , Sweeney Todd. She told NPR in 2005 that Sweeney Todd’s success was far from certain when she began premieres in New York.
“People were appalled by the blood that was splattering at them from the stage,” she recalled. “They felt that Stephen had gone a step too far. But, my goodness, there was another two-thirds of the audience who hadn’t seen it yet who arrived at the theater and they just took it to their hearts and — to make a long story short — we won the Tony that year.”
In the 1980s, Lansbury returned to Hollywood to star in the mysterious Murder television series, She Wrote. The CBS show ran for 12 seasons and made Lansbury a household name, as a senior. She told Fresh Air’s Terry Gross that she was “fortunately caught” as Jessica Fletcher, the mystery writer who solves a murder every week.
“Being Jessica was second nature to me because she embodied all of the qualities that I like about women,” Lansbury said. “She was valiant and liberal and athletic and exciting and sexy and all kinds of good stuff that women are — of a certain age and are not given credit for.”
Lansbury’s acting career spanned an extraordinary seven decades. She has won five Tony Awards, a Lifetime Achievement Award, six Golden Globes, and received the Kennedy Center Honoree for Lifetime Achievement in 2000.