Angela Lansbury, the British-born actress who became a beloved American icon across eight decades and three different mediums, has died. She was 96.
“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.
The indefatigable Lansbury was known across the world as Jessica Fletcher, the busybody, bestselling author, and amateur sleuth who presided over the notoriously murder-rich town of Cabot Cove, Maine, in the long-running CBS series Murder, She Wrote.
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In more recent years, Lansbury had completed a tour of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirt playing an eccentric medium, a role that brought her a fifth Tony Award in 2009 (the only actor with more is Audra McDonald).
It was the kind of over-the-top part that she excelled at, chiefly because they were nothing like herself.
“The art of acting is a built-in ability I cannot take credit for,” Lansbury told the SFGate. “I have been an actress for as long as I can remember, ever since I was very young. I’ve never grown away from my ability to play roles, to become someone else. As an individual, I’m the most boring thing on two feet.”
Where most performers have a single acting career, Lansbury had three distinct ones.
When she was 17 and George Cukor cast her in Gaslight, Lansbury was a war immigrant who had escaped The Blitz with her mother and two younger twin brothers, first to New York and then Los Angeles, where she was supporting her family with a $28 a week job at the cosmetics counter of Bullock’s department store. She had already experienced what she would consider the defining moment of her life when her father died of cancer when she was nine.
“If anything good came out of my father’s early death, it was being catapulted into maturity ahead of my contemporaries,” Lansbury told the Daily Mail. “I grew up fast because I had to.”
Playing a cockney trollop of a maid, Gaslight would earn Lansbury her first of three Oscar nominations. It was a remarkable debut performance, shocking even to her. “How did I have all that assurance?” she would remark years later. “I have much less assurance now. In those days, I suppose, I went ahead on trust.”
She would follow Gaslight immediately with National Velvet and The Picture of Dorian Gray (her second Oscar nod), but Hollywood was perpetually at a loss as to how to use her unclassifiable mix of intelligence and atypical beauty. Said George Cukor, her Gaslight director, “She was consistently miscast.”
She married the late actor and artist Richard Cromwell at 19 and divorced nine months later citing "extreme cruelty"— apparently 1940s speak for "my husband dates guys" (including, allegedly, Howard Hughes). “It made me in, a way, a little bit tough,” Lansbury, who remained friends with Cromwell until his death in the '60s, said of the experience.
She found the love of her life almost immediately after the divorce when she started dating Peter Shaw, a failed actor turned executive and agent whom she would marry in 1949, a union that lasted until his death from heart failure in 2003. “He was everything to me,” she told the Daily Mail. “We were partners at work as well as husband and wife and lovers. I don’t know how we had such a long marriage, but the simple fact was that we were devoted to one another.”
She spent most of the ’50s and ’60s happily making house for Shaw and their two children—Anthony and Deirdre—and less happily, 40 or so largely forgettable movies.
Cursed and blessed with what she called "an inner age"— “I started playing mothers in my twenties,” she has said—Lansbury was forever cast in parts much older than herself. Hedy Lemar was 16 years her senior when Lansbury played her older sister in 1949’s Sampson and Delilah. Warren Beatty was just 12 years younger when she played his mother in All Fall Down; when she played Elvis’ mom in Blue Hawaii, the King was nine years her junior. “[Elvis] was into karate at the time,” said Lansbury, according to Rob Edelman’s Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen. “Between takes, he would break bricks with his hands.”
Still, she’ll go to movie heaven thanks in no small part to her masterful and Oscar-nominated performance as the archetypal mother-from-hell in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate, the 1962 box-office failure which has gone on to become one of the most beloved political thrillers ever made. (Unsurprisingly, her “son” in the film, Lawrence Harvey, was only 3 years younger). The movie disappeared after the assassination of JFK only to be re-released in theaters in 1988, when Lansbury was in her fourth season of Murder, She Wrote.
Modern critics were agog. “Words are puny to describe Angela Lansbury’s acting,” wrote Peter Travers. “Lansbury creates a modern-day Lady Macbeth with the skill of a sorceress. It is an astonishing, engulfing performance.”
Tired of being treated by studios the way kung-fu Elvis dealt with bricks, Lansbury decamped to Broadway to try her hand at musical theater. “I always fancied I had a sexy singing voice, but nobody would let me use it,” she said, making her singing debut with the 1964 Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle. The show flopped, but it led to her being cast in the title role in Mame, the massive hit that kicked off her second career as one of the brightest lights ever to hit the Broadway stage.
Almost overnight, she went from being a Hollywood never-was to the toast of New York. “Hell, I want all the glamour there is,” she told Life. “I’ve been starving for it for years. Added Lansbury, “It was like everything you’ve ever read about—the front table at Sardi’s, like living on another planet. Everyone loves you; everyone loves the success and enjoys it as much as you do.”
Lansbury would get her second chance with Sondheim in 1979 when she created Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, a part she considered among the greatest she ever got to play. Of course, when it came time for the movie versions, her Mame role went to Lucile Ball, and Mrs. Lovett was played on screen by Helena Bonham Carter.
Personal tragedy struck amidst her Broadway glory when her family’s Malibu home burned down during a period when both of her kids were fighting drug addiction. (According to Lansbury, her daughter had fallen in with the Manson crowd.) She and Shaw moved to Cork, Ireland, to regroup and get their kids clean. She kept a home there ever since. “I’m very, very comfortable there,” she told the Irish Post. “I find it an extraordinarily warm and informal place to live. I’m left alone there.”
Her third but far from final act came when she landed Murder, She Wrote, the part that made her internationally recognized and a meme well before such things actually existed. (“I killed them, I killed them all!”). She was nominated for an Emmy for each of the show's 11 seasons, but she never won. “Nobody in Los Angeles ever watched Murder, She Wrote,” she told me in 2012, by way of explaining the decade-plus snub. “It was a show for everyone else.”
Still, it wasn’t as though she lacked recognition. In 2012, the film industry attempted to right a half-century of wrongs by giving her an Honorary Academy Award. A year later, she was reclaimed by her birthplace when Queen Elizabeth named her Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. But for Lansbury, none of those accolades compared to what she experienced every time she got on stage and connected with an audience. “I’m like a racehorse getting out of the gate,” she told the BBC in 2014. “I’m like, ‘Get me out there!’”
Added Lansbury, “Food and drink for an actor is laughter and acceptance. Those given moments when you know something's working and they are with you—that is what you work to achieve in a role. We live for that, and if we don’t get it, we are really very worried indeed.”
