Angela Brigid Lansbury, the character actress and singer was born:16 October 1925, in London, United Kingdom (the voice of Mrs Potts in Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast) and leading lady (Broadway’s eccentric aunt in the musical Mame) was the daughter of Belfast-born actress Moyna MacGill and her second husband, lumber merchant Edgar Lansbury.
Moyna, who was eager to direct her daughter’s future, took the young Angela to plays at London’s Old Vic and enrolled her in a school for the arts and dance until the family found itself broke when the senior Edgar died in 1934. Angela was nine.
A subsequent war only compounded the family’s situation, so in 1940 the Lansbury moved to New York, where Moyna rebooted her acting career and went on tour while Angela babysat her siblings.
Relocating her brood to Los Angeles and now working in a department store, Moyna helped land her daughter a screen test at MGM — which catapulted the 17-year-old into her Oscar-nominated movie debut as the cockney maid in the Ingrid Bergman-Charles Boyer classic 1944 thriller Gaslight.
“It was thanks to my mother who recognized in me an ability to cut up, to make believe, to run around being somebody other than the little girl that I was,” Lansbury told Masterpiece Studio podcast in 2018.
“It made her realise that I was a natural, and she, bless her heart, made the decisions for me very, very, very young,” she added.
The following year, another Oscar nomination came, this time for the role of singer Sibyl Vane in MGM’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which had been hot on the heels of Lansbury’s having played the sister of a very young Elizabeth Taylor in the beloved National Velvet.
She still wasn’t satisfied despite being in the biggest dream factory.
“I was a young woman looking for glamor and attention, and I didn’t really get it,” Lansbury.So what did I do? I got married at 19,” she said.
The groom was handsome leading man Richard Cromwell, who turned out to be gay, something Lansbury didn’t learn until they separated nine months later.
“My first great, great romance. It was a terrible tragedy,” she said, adding that the two remained friends until his death from cancer in 1960.
Shortly after her divorce, she met British actor Peter Shaw who later became a prominent Hollywood agent.
They were married in London in 1949, with Moyna serving as matron of honour. Movie, live TV, and Broadway roles followed, including the role of Elvis Presley’s mother in the 1961 hit, Blue Hawaii.
A more substantial maternal role, as Laurence Harvey’s monster of a mother in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate (this time, she was only three years older than her screen son), established Lansbury’s reputation as a character actress, as well as earned her a third Oscar nomination.
Four years later, she landed on the cover of Life Magazine as the toast of Broadway in Mame, and earned the first of five Tony awards, a record matched only by Julie Harris and then finally broken in 2014, by Audra McDonald.
Problems of a highly personal nature — the Shaw children, Anthony (born in 1952) and Deirdre (in 1953), were both on substance abuse forced a 1971 family move to County Cork, Ireland, which, Lansbury said, “was one of the last places on earth that was fairly drug-free.”
The thespian commuted between Ireland, London, and New York for the next decade until the kids were clean, then bounced back professionally in 1978, when she created the iconic role of murder accomplice Lovett in the operatic Stephen Sondheim Broadway musical Sweeney Todd.
Debuting in 1984, Murder, She Wrote put Lansbury front and centre for 256 episodes, earning her an impressive 12 Emmy nominations — though, strangely, never a win.
“It’s awfully hard to tell the difference between the two,” said Peter Shaw when asked to compare his wife to Fletcher. “Angela has that marvelous gumption, and that’s one of the nice things that Jessica has,” he added.
After she solved her last TV murder, Lansbury embarked on numerous other projects, on television and on Broadway.
Although that Emmy continued to elude her (in all, she was nominated 18 times), she did receive a 1996 Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award, a 1997 American National Medal of the Arts, and a 2000 Kennedy Centre Honour.
In a 2014 ceremony at Windsor Castle, she was officially made Dame Angela by Queen Elizabeth — at the time she was playing the spiritualist Madame Arcati in a London production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
Lansbury was awarded the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in June, marking her sixth Tony Award overall.
The Broadway legend won four Tonys between the time she appeared as Mame Dennis in 1966’s Mame and Lovett in 1979’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.
She went on to win a fifth Tony for 2009’s Blithe Spirit, her first Tony for her performance in a play versus a musical.
“It has been an outstanding life, especially for me. And the great news is, girls, the opportunities are out there for us at all ages,” Lansbury told her peers when she received the SAG honor.
Lansbury’s death comes in the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death last month.
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