Angela Lansbury

Actress Angela Lansbury, who became a household name through her role as a writer-detective in "Murder, She Wrote," died on Tuesday, her family announced.

She became a star in the title role of the 1966 musical “Mame”, about rich New Yorkers during the Depression, for which she trod the boards more than 1,500 times and won her first Tony Award. I am a character actress,” she told BBC radio in 2014. just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” a statement widely quoted in US media said. But she continued to pick up roles in cinema, gaining a younger audience as the witch in the hit Disney film “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” in 1971. In the 1961 musical comedy “Blue Hawaii”, for example, she was the mother of a dashing tour guide played by Elvis Presley, who was only 10 years her junior. She was 96.

Hollywood actress Angela Lansbury, known for her commanding, ladylike presence on stage, screen and television has died at the age of 96.

Lovett in 1979’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. She also got an Oscar nomination in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate Born Angela Brigid Lansbury, the future character actress (the voice of Mrs.

The Irish-British and American actress was best known for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher in American drama series: “Murder, She Wrote.”

The couple divorced in 1946, but remained friends until Cromwell’s death in 1960. Lansbury was criticised for comments she made about women taking the blame for sexual harassment in the wake of allegations made against Harvey Weinstein and others in Hollywood. In addition to her success on screen, Lansbury became a star on Broadway after her performance as the titular character in “Mame”. Of the damehood she said: “It is a very proud day for me to be recognised by the country of my birth, and to meet the Queen under these circumstances is a rare and lovely occasion.” Lansbury was made a CBE in the Queen’s 1994 birthday honours and was made a DBE in the 2014 New Year Honours for services to drama, charitable work and philanthropy. The Irish-British and American actress was best known for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher in American drama series: “Murder, She Wrote.”

Dame Angela Lansbury won a legion of fans throughout her illustrious career. The late actress was best known for playing Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, ...

She had leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, among others. Lansbury's performance is heard during the film's famous ballroom sequence. She also led the cast in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971.

Angela Lansbury, the Irish-British-American actress and singer who played various roles across film, stage, and television, has passed away.

This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express written permission from TheCable. today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” the statement reads. She became a member of the acting aristocracy in Britain, where she was born; America, her home for most of her life; and Ireland, where she kept a house for many decades.

She performed without sentimentality or histrionics, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining professional and approachable.

“And when I say I took care of him,” she said, with as much overt emotion as I ever heard from her, “I really took care of him.” Feeling through action was the Lansbury touch, and if it came at some cost to her, it never showed. What showed was the brilliance of her technique, informed by feeling you couldn’t in fact see. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.” [who died on Tuesday at 96](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/11/arts/angela-lansbury-dead.html), was “boring as all get out,” as she later added, that too was a costume, and a tool. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t stand up for herself and her characters. The technician is like a great musician: I play this note and then I stop.” She was already independent, unafraid and a problem solver: The corollary was that she needed to play many different kinds of characters, to make the best yield of all she’d observed. And she was certainly no Nellie Lovett, the human-pie-maker of “Sweeney Todd,” a performance that earned her the fourth of six Tony Awards, in 1979. But the woman in the slippers and robe was no Cora Hoover Hooper, the cartoon mayoress of “Anyone Can Whistle,” her first stage musical role, in 1964. “Just a cabbage,” she said.

To understand her greatness, look no further than one of the silliest films she ever appeared in: 1971's Bedknobs and Broomsticks.

Lansbury was quick to joke about the narrow pathways Hollywood found for her in her prime, but she also kept evolving past them, enduring decade after decade and resonating with different generations in different ways. Asked to take in three orphaned children, she’s reluctant at first but quickly bonds with them over their love of the magical arts she’s still learning. Released to mixed reviews, it was at best a modest success, but I watched it constantly on VHS as a child. A jury could debate for weeks over her greatest part and fail to arrive at a definitive answer. She was a chilling villain in The Manchurian Candidate, a flighty and flirty accomplice to the psychological torment of Gaslight, and a winsome tavern singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning an Oscar nomination for each role. Angela Lansbury was a boundlessly versatile performer, with a decades-long career filled with roles that played to her many strengths.

Among other achievements, the actress, who died Tuesday at 96, inhabited some of most sensational roles in musical theater history — and did it ...

“What you have to accept with me is, I would do whatever interested me to attempt; it’s the feeling of, ‘I would love to pull that off,’ ” she recalled on that afternoon a dozen years ago. I only know her 1966 “Mame” from endless replays of her voice on the cast album, singing Jerry Herman’s buoyant tunes, and her 1974 ″Gypsy” from accounts by friends who saw it. [plus a lifetime achievement award](https://www.washingtonpost.com/theater-dance/2022/06/12/tony-awards-2022-winners/?itid=lk_inline_manual_13) earlier this year), for the original “Mame” and “Dear World” and a beloved revival of “Gypsy.” Such were the rigors of booking a job in the good old days; it’s now rare for stars of her accomplishment to submit to auditions. “When I hear the recording, I think, ‘How the hell did I do that?’ ” Lansbury observed that day, chuckling. The prospect of work still lit her up, as could memories of indelible triumphs like “Sweeney.” Her collaboration with Sondheim, who died 11 months ago at 91, ranged over peerless hits — “Sweeney Todd” is being revived on Broadway this season, with Josh Groban and Annaleigh Ashford — and storied flops. She was both grandmotherly and girlish at the tender age of 85 and yet to perform what would be her final Broadway role, in 2012’s “The Best Man,” by Gore Vidal. Whether a role called for grit or grace, pluck or poise, Lansbury could summon qualities that led a show past exceptional and all the way to unforgettable. Not only had she been Angela Lansbury for so long, but she was also — always — the best Angela Lansbury any audience could hope for. Back in New York, Lansbury said, Sondheim sang “The Worst Pies” for her — a tricky song rhythmically, involving the syncopated exertions of kneading of the pie dough. Potts, but Broadway history claimed her far more centrally, as some of the most dazzlingly flamboyant characters in the musical-theater canon: Mame. Ageless Angela Lansbury may have been celebrated in television and movie culture as Jessica Fletcher and Mrs.

The actress, who died this week at ninety-six, revealed every facet of her talents.

While “Murder, She Wrote” made Lansbury a living-room fixture, “Beauty and the Beast” introduced her to a new generation of six-year-olds—and to every generation of six-year-olds that came after. But her range shouldn’t be forgotten: when she chose to be, she was a consummate villainess, a comedic sharpshooter, and a sequined show horse who could bring down the house. In “The Manchurian Candidate,” the next year, she was three years older than Laurence Harvey, the actor playing her son. In the later sixties and seventies, she was a brassy Broadway belter in “Mame” and “Gypsy.” (She won six Tony Awards, including one for lifetime achievement.) She was the unlikely star of a 1988 “I was always in makeup to play beastly women in their forties or fifties,” she complained. “Here was this ridiculous, rather naïve little woman who was mad about Sweeney Todd,” she [told John Lahr](https://www.newyorker.com/video/watch/angela-lansbury), in 2009, “and who would have done anything in the world for him but was totally incapable of seeing right or wrong and went along with anything he suggested just to stay in with him.” She said it was her happiest experience on a stage. In the Cold War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), she played a political puppet master who commands her own brainwashed son to “shoot the Presidential nominee through the head.” Her [performance](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3ZnaRMhD_A), which earned the last of her three Oscar nominations, still chills the bones—this ain’t no Mrs. She played Elvis Presley’s mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961), when he was twenty-six and she was thirty-six. When she [appeared](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYdCzIrMEXw) in the last scene of “Mary Poppins Returns” (2018), as a sweet balloon seller, I burst into tears. She started playing mothers—usually bad ones—when she was twenty, and fell into a rut in the fifties. And she wedged herself—or at least her unmistakable voice—into children’s imaginations decade after decade, whether as a witch-in-training in “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971), a corrupt sorceress in “The Last Unicorn” (1982), or a kindly teapot in “Beauty and the Beast” (1991). [saucy Cockney maid](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNZwCDvXmFQ) in M-G-M’s “Gaslight”—she was seventeen when she landed the part—for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, one of three nominations she received before she was forty.

Legendary actress Angela Lansbury sent chills down our spines as a maniacal matriarch in The Manchurian Candidate.

It's not often that viewers cheer the killing of a mother on film, but Lansbury's precision in capturing the pure vileness and immorality of a woman literally driven to madness in the pursuit of supremacy made viewers wish for nothing more than Elizabeth's deservedly violent demise. And although Lansbury turned in hundreds of memorable performances in her long career, it's her terrifying turn in The Manchurian Candidate that remains iconic. Then, in a startlingly disturbing moment, Eleanor kisses Raymond — not on the forehead, not on the cheek, but squarely on the lips in a lingering exhibition of passion. "You will shoot the presidential nominee through the head," Eleanor instructs Raymond without an ounce of hesitation, then goes on to detail the dramatic events that will follow and that will secure her husband's place as an American hero. Lansbury is so precise in bringing Eleanor's worst qualities to the forefront that with every moment she's on the screen, the audience's contempt for her boils like liquid in a pot. Though she utters not a word of dialogue in the scene, viewers can feel Eleanor's sense of desperation, knowing that her twisted visions are just moments from being realized. Except for Janet Leigh, of course.” While lighting and makeup may have helped add some years to her face in the film, it was Lansbury's ability to embody Eleanor's fully depraved presence that made her so believable as a woman on the tail end of middle age, coarsened by a life singularly fueled by the lust for power and revenge. At times humorous in her stinging emasculation of Johnny, Eleanor is more often disturbing as a woman clearly lacking a moral compass. Barking orders and speaking at the velocity of a ticker tape machine operating at full tilt, it's immediately clear that Eleanor is a woman in charge. For starters, at the time, she was best known for her performances in tony literary dramas like 1945's The Picture of Dorian Gray and 1948's The Three Musketeers. "I was just beginning to do big drama, so put my faith in Frankenheimer and that marvelous script by George Axelrod based on Richard Condon’s novel, which I had read.” Still, reflecting on her decision to take the part, she said "it was pretty foolhardy." Senator (James Gregory) and mother of Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), a former Korean War prisoner struggling with post-traumatic stress syndrome, Lansbury became one of the most frightening and detestable mother figures in the history of cinema.

The long-time Broadway collaborators will both apparently show up as themselves in the Knives Out sequel.

This is [per Playbill](https://www.playbill.com/article/angela-lansbury-and-stephen-sondheim-will-make-posthumous-onscreen-appearances-in-knives-out-film-sequel), which reports that Netflix’s follow-up to Johnson’s star-studded mystery story will be the final screen credit for both Lansbury and her frequent collaborator Sondheim, who [died in November of 2021](https://www.avclub.com/r-i-p-stephen-sondheim-legendary-broadway-songwriter-1848125723). Lansbury, of course, was no stranger to theatrical murder, from her film debut in 1944's Gaslight onward; we can only hope that Murder She Wrote’s J.P. Details about the film’s plot are still being kept largely under wraps—it being a mystery story, and all that—but the Playbill report notes that Lansbury and Sondheim will both appear as themselves.