Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury, best known to American audiences for her roles as the iconic detective novelist Jessica Fletcher in the 1980s television series Murder She Wrote and as the voice of Mrs. Potts in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast has passed away today at the age of 96. In addition to her best-known roles, Lansbury was a legend of musical theatre, having won five Tony awards over the course of her long career.
Lansbury was born in London to Irish actor Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. In 1940, she left England to escape the German bombing during the Blitz and began studying acting in New York City. After signing with MGM in 1942 she appeared in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray earning Oscar nods for both films and a Golden Globe for her part as Sibyl Vane, the young ingenue corrupted by Hurd Hatfield’s Dorian Gray.
After languishing in B-list roles for most of the 1950s, Lansbury went on to play perhaps her most iconic film role in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. As Eleanor Iselin, the controller of sleeper agent Raymond Shaw, Lansbury turned in a performance as one of the most malevolent antagonists of the Cold War and earned herself another Oscar nomination and yet another Golden Globe.
Lansbury followed her screen success with one of the most legendary stage careers ever, after achieving unlooked-for success in Mame, the musical version of the 1955 novel. At the age of forty-one, it was Lansbury’s first leading role in her career. The part not only put her star in the Broadway firmament but made Lansbury, who performed in ten of the play’s musical numbers and dance sequences, all while whisking from one fabulously glamorous outfit into the next, a queer icon for the rest of her life.
Lansbury would go on to dominate the Great White Way for the next two decades, winning Tony awards for her part in Mame, Dear World, Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. After returning to Broadway in the 2000s and 2010s, Lansbury again took home the Tony for her part in the 2009 revival of Blithe Spirit and was nominated for her work in 2010s A Little Night Music. She was honored with a Tony for lifetime achievement earlier this year.
In the eighties and nineties, Lansbury would receive her greatest fame and international renown when she agreed to take on the role of Jessica Fletcher, the star of Murder, She Wrote, a story by the creators of Colombo. Fletcher, an ex-homemaker turned mystery novelist turned armchair detective. Week after week Fletcher would find herself in the midst of some mysterious death that she would handily solve. The show proved immensely popular, particularly among older audiences, mostly on the charm of Lansbury’s Fletcher and the lack of any real violence, murder notwithstanding.
Although she never received an Emmy for her performance, Lansbury was regularly nominated from the year the series first aired in 1984 to its cancellation in 1996.
According to her family, Lansbury died peacefully in her sleep. No cause of death has yet been released. She was only five days short of her 97th birthday. “The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles,” read a statement, released on Tuesday evening according to the BBC.
Lansbury is survived by her two children with husband Peter Shaw, Anthony, a television director, and Deirdre, a restaurateur as well as her stepson, David. Shaw predeceased Lansbury in 2003.
Published: Oct 11, 2022 04:30 pm