‘Murder She Wrote’ actress Angela Lansbury has died aged 96

NEW YORK –

Angela Lansbury, the scene-stealing British actress who kicked up her heels on Broadway musicals Mame and Gypsy and solved endless murders as crime writer Jessica Fletcher on the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote, has died. She was 96.

Lansbury died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, according to testimony from her three children. She died five days before her 97th birthday.

Her 75-year career has spanned popular musicals on stage, iron-fisted matriarchs in film, singing the theme song for the animated film Beauty and the Beast, being made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II and creating one of the most popular characters of television.

Lansbury has won five Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a lifetime achievement award. She received Oscar nominations for supporting actress for two of her first three films, Gaslight (1945) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1946), and was nominated again in 1962 for The Manchurian Candidate and her deadly portrayal of a communist agent and the mother of the title character.

Her mature demeanor led producers to cast her as much older than her actual age. In 1948, when she was 23, she wore strands of gray so she could play a forties newspaper editor in State of the Union who was interested in Spencer Tracy.

Her fame came in middle age when she became the hit of New York theater, winning Tony Awards for “Mame” (1966), “Dear World” (1969), “Gypsy” (1975) and “Sweeney Todd” (1979). . .

She was back on Broadway and received another Tony nomination in 2007 in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, in which she played a seedy, brash former tennis star who ponders with another ex-star while watching a modern day game from the stands . In 2009 she received her fifth Tony for Best Actress in a revival of Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” and won an Olivier Award for the role in 2015.

The Broadway kings paid their respects. Audra McDonald tweeted: “She was an icon, a legend, a gem and about the nicest woman you would ever want to meet.” Leslie Uggams wrote on Twitter: “Dame Angela was so sweet to me when I made my Broadway debut . She was a key person who welcomed me into the community. She really lived, lived, lived!”

But Lansbury’s greatest fame began in 1984 when she launched Murder, She Wrote on CBS. Loosely based on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, the series centers on Jessica Fletcher, a middle-aged widow and former substitute school teacher who lives in the coastal village of Cabot Cove, Maine. She had become known as a crime writer and amateur detective.

The actor found the first season of the series exhausting.

“I was shocked to learn that I had to work 12 to 15 hours a day, relentlessly,” she recalls. “I eventually had to put the law down and say, ‘Look, I can’t do these shows in seven days; it has to be eight days.’

CBS and the production company Universal Studio agreed, especially since “Murder, She Wrote” had become a Sunday night hit. Despite the long days — leaving her home in Brentwood, West Los Angeles, at 6 a.m. and returning after dark — and countless lines of dialogue to memorize, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. She was pleased that Jessica Fletcher served as an inspiration for older women.

“Women in movies have always had a hard time being role models for other women,” she noted. “They’ve always been considered glamorous in their jobs.”

In the show’s first season, Jessica wore almost dated clothes. Then she gained intelligence, Lansbury argued that as a successful woman, Jessica should dress the role.

“Murder, She Wrote” stayed high in ratings through its 11th year. CBS then moved the series to a less favorable weekday slot because it was seeking a younger audience for Sunday nights. Lansbury protested vigorously to no avail. As expected, ratings plummeted and the show was cancelled. For consolation, CBS commissioned two-hour films featuring “Murder, She Wrote” and other specials starring Lansbury.

“Murder, She Wrote” and other television work earned her 18 Emmy nominations, but she never won one. She holds the record for most Golden Globe nominations, winning Best Actress in a Television Series and most Emmy nominations for Lead Actress in a Drama Series.

In a 2008 interview with the Associated Press, Lansbury said she still welcomes the right script but doesn’t want to play “old, decrepit women,” she said. “I want women my age to be represented for who they are, which are vital, productive members of society.”

“I’m amazed at the amount of stuff I’ve been able to fit in over the years I’ve been in business. And I’m still here!”

She was given the name Angela Brigid Lansbury when she was born in London on October 16, 1925. Her family was respected: a grandfather was the fiery leader of the Labor Party; her father owner of a veneer factory; her mother a successful actress, Moyna MacGill.

“I was terribly shy, absolutely unable to get out of myself,” Lansbury recalled of her youth. “It took me years to get over it.”

The Depression forced her father’s factory into bankruptcy, and for a number of years the family lived off the money her mother saved from her theater career. Angela suffered a devastating blow when her beloved father died in 1935. The tragedy forced her to become self-employed – “almost a substitute for my mother”.

When England was threatened by German bombing raids in 1940, Moyna Lansbury fought her way through the bureaucracy and fought for passage to America for her family. With the help of two foster families, they settled in New York and lived on $150 a month. At 16, to supplement her income, Angela got a job at a Montreal nightclub doing impersonations and songs.

“The only thing I’ve ever trusted is my ability to perform,” she said. “That was the grace note in my Sonata of Life, the thing that absolutely saw me through thick and thin.”

Moyna moved to Hollywood with the family in hopes of finding work as an actress. Otherwise, she and Angela wrapped packages and sold clothes at a department store. An actor friend suggested that Angela would be ideal for the role of Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was being prepared at MGM. She tested, and studio boss Louis B. Mayer commanded, “Sign the girl!”

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 signing. She has appeared as Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in National Velvet, Judy Garland’s nemesis in The Harvey Girls, Walter Pidgeon’s spiteful wife in If Winter Comes and Queen Anne in The Three Musketeers.

Tired of playing roles twice her age, she left MGM to work freelance, but the results were the same: the mother of Warren Beatty in All Fall Down, of Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii ‘, by Carroll Baker in ‘Harlow,’ and by Laurence Harvey in ‘The Manchurian Candidate’, in which she memorably manipulates her son and helps start a killing spree.

In the mid-1940s, Lansbury had a disastrous nine-month marriage to Richard Cromwell, a soulful young star of the 1930s. In 1949 she married Peter Shaw, a British man who had an acting contract with MGM, and then became a studio manager and agent. He took over the role of manager of Lansbury. They had two children; he had a son from a previous marriage.

The 1950s were a troubled time for the Shaws. Angela’s career slowed; her mother died after a battle with cancer; Peter underwent hip surgery; the kids were on drugs; The family home in Malibu burned to the ground.

Lansbury later said of the fire: “It’s like cutting off a branch, a big, lush branch of your life, and putting a seal on it so it doesn’t bleed. That’s what you do. That’s how the human mind goes about things with it. You have to pick up the pieces and move on.”

Tired of 20 years of typecasting, Lansbury tried her luck on Broadway. Their first two shows – Anyone Can Whistle and Hotel Paradiso (with Bert Lahr) – flopped.

Then came “Mom”. Rosalind Russell declined to reprise her classic role as Patrick Dennis’ dizzying aunt in a musical version. So did Mary Martin and Ethel Merman. Others Considered: Bette Davis, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, Beatrice Lillie, Judy Garland. Composer Jerry Herman chose Lansbury.

The opening on May 24, 1966 was a sensation. One reviewer marveled that “the film’s battered, clumsy old Harridan with a snake pit for a mouth” might prove to be “the liveliest lady since Carol Channing in ‘Hello, Dolly’.”

Following her Sweeney Todd triumph, Lansbury returned to Hollywood to try television. She was offered a sitcom starring Charles Durning or Murder, She Wrote. The producers wanted Jean Stapleton, who declined. Lansbury accepted.

During the series’ long run, she managed to star in TV movies, host Emmy and Tony shows, and even provide the voice for a Disney animated film. She played Mrs. Potts in “Beauty and the Beast” and sang the theme song. “It was really a breakthrough for me,” she said of her young following. “It introduced me to a generation I might not have been able to contact.”

In 2000, Lansbury pulled out of a proposed Broadway musical, The Visit, because she needed to help her husband recover from heart surgery. “The kind of commitment that’s required of an artist carrying a multi-million dollar production has to be 100%,” she said in a letter to producers.

Her husband died in 2003.

In 2012, she returned to Broadway in a revival of The Best Man, sharing the stage with James Earl Jones, John Larroquette, Candice Bergen, Eric McCormack, Michael McKean and Kerry Butler. She also recently starred in Emma Thompson’s Nanny McPhee and with Jim Carrey in Mr. Popper’s penguins”.

At the 2022 Tony Awards, Len Cariou – her “Sweeney Todd” co-star – accepted the Tony Lansbury for Life. “There’s nobody I’d rather have a cutthroat business with,” Cariou said.

In 1990, Lansbury philosophized: “I’ve sometimes retired from my career. Where to? Home. Home is the counterbalance to work.”

In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, five great-grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury.