Angela Lansbury, Storied Actress Of Film, TV & The Stage, Dies At 96

The legendary actress Dame Angela Lansbury, who has delivered memorable performances in countless film roles from 1944 to 2017, died at the age of 96. She reportedly passed “peacefully in her sleep at home” early in the morning Tuesday in Los Angeles.

Known as one of the best character actresses of all time, Lansbury has performed with equal caliber in stories like the long-running mystery series Murder She Wrote, stage musicals like Sweeney Todd, and even some legendary animated films like Anastasia and Beauty and the Beast.

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At the time of her death, Lansbury was one of the last surviving actors associated with the Golden Age of Hollywood. She continued to reinvent herself with strong appearances into her later life, though she will always be best known for appearing in some of the best and most enduring films and Broadway musicals of the mid-20th century.

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925 in London, England. Her family was wealthy and well-connected, with her mother being well-known stage and screen actress Moyna Macgill, and her father being Edgar Lansbury, a merchant and Communist Party of Great Britain member. However, upon Edgar’s death when Angela was about nine, her family experienced financial hardship before Moyna met her second husband Leckie Forbes.

The young Lansbury developed a voracious appetite for books, theater and films, and took to playing characters even as a child. She studied at the Feagin School of Dramatic art at Carnegie Hall, after her mother evacuated the family to New York in 1940. While Lansbury was trying to begin her own acting career, Moyna was also moving all over North America for roles of her own, so she followed her to Montreal and eventually Los Angeles after graduating theater school in 1942.

At the age of 17, Lansbury landed her debut major film role in the drama Gaslight. She got the part through an encounter with one of the film’s writers, John van Druten. The film also starred Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in the lead roles, and Lansbury played a conniving maid Nancy Oliver. Stunningly, Lansbury received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for this performance, showing she could already act at an extremely high level from a young age.

She received another nomination the next year for The Picture of Dorian Grey, which received similarly mixed reviews to Gaslight but was still seemingly elevated by her star power in it. Lansbury would continue working for studio MGM for the rest of the decade until the end of her contract in 1952, also getting married twice in that time period to Richard Cromwell and then to her longtime husband Peter Shaw (né Pullen).

Lansbury eventually tired of the roles she was given by MGM, which usually cast her as “a series of venal bitches” in her own words from her biography by Rob Edelman & Audrey Kupferberg. She had to resist being typecast as older bitter women by mainstream Hollywood companies for much of her career. Despite her talent & success, some still considered her a B-List pick for casting. Extremely strong performances in the 60s in films like The Manchurian Candidate and the show Mame helped Lansbury leave her own mark on the industry in a huge way.

After years in big pictures and on Broadway, Lansbury moved into TV when she began playing the sleuth and mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. She even developed her behind-the-scenes presence in this role, eventually becoming executive producer for the show in its final four seasons.

In her later career, Lansbury delivered some iconic voice performances, including as the tea kettle Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast and several voices in Anastasia. Her 2000s-era roles were very kid-friendly, with credits like Nanny McPhee, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and occasional times voicing Mrs. Potts in other Disney programming.

Dame Angela Lansbury is survived by her brother, three children Anthony, Deirdre and David, three grandchildren Peter, Katherine and Ian, and five great-grandchildren.