Angela Lansbury, who had a diverse, award-winning film and stage career before becoming America’s favorite TV detective in “Murder, She Wrote,” has died, according to a statement sent by her family. She was 96 years old.
“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,” her family said in a statement.
Lansbury received her first Oscar nomination in 1944, when she was just 20 years old, for her film debut, “Gaslight.” Her second came the following year in “The Portrait of Dorian Gray,” and she appeared in “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 as the mother who betrays her son and her nation. (She won Golden Globes for the latter two films.)
The actress received an honorary Oscar in 2013, in addition to the five Tony Awards she received during a 40-year period, beginning with “Mame” in 1966 and ending with a production of Noel Coward’s play “Blithe Spirit” in 2009. Lansbury was nominated for 11 Emmys for her performance as Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote,” but she never won.
Lansbury moved from ingenue to portraying more mature parts almost overnight. She was 37, for example, when she played Laurence Harvey’s devious mother in “Manchurian Candidate,” even though her co-star was only two years her junior.
Her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an actress, and her father, Edward Lansbury, was a politician. He died when she was nine years old, and just after the outbreak of World War II, the family relocated to the United States, landing in New York.
Lansbury studied theatre before traveling to Los Angeles at her mother’s prompting, where she temporarily worked in a department shop before obtaining her breakout role as the teenage maid in “Gaslight,” starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.
Other films in which she appeared were “National Velvet” (in which she played Elizabeth Taylor’s sister), “The Harvey Girls,” “The Three Musketeers,” the Danny Kaye comedy “The Court Jester,” and Elvis Presley’s “Blue Hawaii.”
Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 and went on to appear in Tony Award-winning performances in “Mame,” “Gypsy,” and “Sweeney Todd.”
Lansbury was loved by generations of youngsters for her Disney appearances, first in the 1971 film musical “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” and then as Mrs. Potts in the 1991 Oscar-nominated animated feature “Beauty and the Beast.” She also appeared in the 2018 sequel “Mary Poppins Returns.”
In 2012, she said, “Oddly enough, youngsters recognize my voice.” “When they hear me, they’ll exclaim, ‘Mom, that’s Mrs. Potts!'”
Lansbury married British actor Peter Shaw in 1949 after a brief marriage to actor Richard Cromwell. They were married until his death in 2003, and they had two children, Anthony, who directed numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote,” and Deirdre. Shaw ultimately became her manager and was a key player in the arrangement that made them the producers of the series, which debuted in 1984.