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Angela Lansbury, a London-born actress who spent seven decades bringing a powerful, ladylike presence to stage, movie, and television, particularly throughout the 12 years she portrayed fearless mystery author Jessica Fletcher on CBS’ Murder, She Wrote, has passed away. She was 96.
Just five days shy of her 97th birthday, “the children of Dame Angela Lansbury are devastated to announce that their mother passed away quietly in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 a.m, Tuesday, October 11, 2022,” her family said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.
The statement continues, “In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre, and David, she is also survived by her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury, and three grandsons, Peter, Katherine, and Ian, as well as five great-grandchildren. “Peter Shaw, her 53-year-old husband, preceded her in death. At a later time, there will be a small family ceremony.”
The future leading lady (Broadway’s eccentric aunt in the musical Mame) and character actress (Mrs. Potts in Disney’s animated Beauty and the Beast), both of whom went by the stage name Angela Brigid Lansbury, was the daughter of Belfast-born actress Moyna MacGill and her second husband, timber businessman Edgar Lansbury.
Lansbury called her mother “a real Irish beauty” in a 1993 PEOPLE profile.
Photo Credits – FREDERICK M. BROWN/GETTY
To shape her daughter’s future, Moyna took the young Angela to plays at London’s Old Vic and enrolled her in a school for the arts and dancing.
However, when the elder Edgar Moyna passed away in 1934, the family—which included Angela and her younger (by five years) twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce, who both went on to become renowned producers, as well as a half-sister—found itself all but broke. Angela was nine years old.
The family’s predicament was only made worse by the war, so in 1940 the Lansburys relocated to New York, where Moyna restarted her acting career and went on tour while Angela looked after her siblings.
After moving her family to Los Angeles and starting a job in a department store, Moyna assisted in getting her daughter an MGM screen test, which led to the 17-year-Oscar-nominated old’s film debut as the cockney maid in the Ingrid Bergman-Charles Boyer classic 1944 thriller Gaslight
In 2018, Lansbury discussed how she entered the entertainment industry on the Masterpiece Studio podcast. “It was because to my mother who saw in me a capacity to cut up, to make believe, and to run around being somebody other than the little girl that I was,” Lansbury said.
She, bless her heart, made the decisions for me when I was very, very, very little because it made her understand that I was a natural.
Another Oscar nomination came the following year, this time for Angela Lansbury’s portrayal of vocalist Sibyl Vane in MGM’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which came shortly after Lansbury’s performance as the younger sister of an extremely young Elizabeth Taylor in the acclaimed National Velvet.
Even with the stunning Ava Gardner, Lana Turner, and Hedy Lamarr working on nearby soundstages, being employed by the largest Dream Factory on Earth did little to increase the teen’s self-confidence.
In an interview with PEOPLE, Lansbury said, “I was a young woman searching for glamor and attention, and I didn’t receive it. “What then did I do? I married when I was 19.”
It turned out that the gorgeous leading guy Richard Cromwell was g*ay; Lansbury didn’t find out until they split up nine months later. “My very first fantastic relationship. It was an awful tragedy “She continued, mentioning that the two stayed close until his passing from cancer in 1960.
A Fresh Start
She met Peter Shaw, a British actor who eventually rose to prominence as a Hollywood agent, not long after her divorce. In 1949, Moyna served as the matron of honor during their wedding in London.
Even though Angela Lansbury was just ten years Elvis’ senior, she played roles in films, live TV shows, and Broadway, including that of Elvis Presley’s mother in the 1961 smash Blue Hawaii.
In 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, Lansbury played the monstrous mother of Laurence Harvey; this time, she was just three years older than her on-screen son. This portrayal solidified Lansbury’s reputation as a character actress and brought her a third Oscar nomination.
Four years later, she appeared as the toast of Broadway in Mame on the cover of Life magazine, winning the first of five Tony awards, a record only Julie Harris could duplicate before Audra McDonald eventually surpassed it in 2014.
Family Came Before Everything Else
In 1971, the Shaw family was forced to relocate to County Cork, Ireland, which, according to Lansbury, “was one of the last locations on earth that were pretty drug-free.”
This was due to problems of a highly personal nature, as the parents learned that the Shaw children, Anthony (born in 1952) and Deirdre (born in 1953), were both using hard drugs
After spending the following ten years commuting between Ireland, London, and New York while the kids were clean, Lansbury resumed her professional career in 1978 when she created the legendary part of murder accomplice, Mrs. Lovett, in the operatic Broadway musical Sweeney Todd by Stephen Sondheim.
Lansbury’s way was paved for Jessica Fletcher, the character for which she will perhaps be best known and undoubtedly most loved, in addition to receiving another Tony. Lansbury starred in 256 episodes of Murder, She Wrote beginning in 1984, garnering a remarkable 12 Emmy nominations but oddly never a win.
Peter Shaw responded to a question about how his wife and Fletcher compare by saying, “It’s tough to tell the difference between the two.” Shaw, 84, passed away in 2003. One of Jessica’s positive traits, according to Angela, is her amazing gumption.
Gumption, certainly. Lansbury started working on much other television and Broadway projects after she solved her last TV “murder.”
Even though she was nominated for an Emmy 18 times in total, she never won it, but she did earn other honors such as the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1996, the American National Medal of the Arts in 1997, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2000, and the official title of Dame Angela from Queen Elizabeth in a ceremony held at Windsor Castle in 2014, while she was portraying the medium Madame Arcati in a production of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit in London.
In June, Lansbury won the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, giving her six Tony Awards.
Between her roles as Mame Dennis in the 1966 film Mame and Mrs. Lovett in the 1979 production of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, this Broadway legend received four Tony Awards.
She went on to win a fifth Tony for the play Blithe Spirit in 2009, her first Tony for a play rather than a musical.
Lansbury told her peers after she earned the SAG award, “It has been an outstanding life, especially for me.”
“And the good news is that we may take advantage of these chances at any age, girls. I mean, take a look at some of the wonderful work done by women in modern cinema. I am so inspired to press forward and pursue new career goals. A career is after all still a work in progress in my opinion.”
The actress, 92 years old, had no intention of slowing down. After starring in the PBS Little Women miniseries and working with director Vanessa Caswill—the first female director Lansbury had ever worked with in her 80-year career—she was questioned about if the project would be her last.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s my swan song, though. My actions won’t end there. Although I already have other responsibilities, it has been said that this will be my final act. Though it isn’t, “said Lansbury, whose character, the Balloon Lady, appeared in the 2018 film Mary Poppins Returns.
“I know at 92 I should be considering swanning out, but I don’t know if you have the energy, excitement, and interest, I don’t think you ever truly stop,” she said.
