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The entertainment industry lost a legend today. The children of Dame Angela Lansbury have sadly had to announce that their mother has passed away at the age of 96 – just five days shy of her 97th birthday. According to the announcement, Lansbury “died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022.”
Lansbury is best known for her twelve season, 264 episode run as author / crime solver Jessica Fletcher on the mystery series Murder, She Wrote – a role she went on to reprise in four made-for-TV movies. But when you look on her filmography, Murder, She Wrote is just one of 111 screen acting credits she earned during a career that stretched back to 1944.
Born in London on October 16, 1925, Lansbury is said to have “retreated into playing characters” after her politician father died of stomach cancer in 1935. She became interested in film while attending high school, and started appearing in plays while attending the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art. In 1940, her mother moved her and two of her siblings to the United States to escape the Blitz. Once in America, she continued studying acting and started pursuing jobs in the entertainment industry. She made her way to Hollywood in 1942, and two years later made her screen debut in the 1944 classic Gaslight. She earned an Oscar nomination in the category of Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her performance in that film.
Over the decades, Lansbury worked on such films and TV shows as National Velvet, The Harvey Girls, The Three Musketeers (1948), Please Murder Me!, The Long Hot Summer, Blue Hawaii, The Greatest Story Ever Told, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Death on the Nile, The Lady Vanishes, The Mirror Crack’d, Sweeney Todd (1982), The Company of Wolves, Magnum P.I. (a Murder, She Wrote crossover episode), Shootdown, Newhart, Beauty and the Beast, Mrs. ‘arris Goes to Paris, Mrs. Santa Claus, Touched by an Angel, Anastasia, Law & Order, Nanny McPhee, Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Little Women (2017), The Grinch, and Mary Poppins Returns, among many others. She earned her second and third Oscar nominations for her roles in The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate. She was given an honorary Oscar in 2014.
Lansbury was nominated for Emmy Awards eighteen times, but shockingly never won. She did take home awards for her stage work, winning six Tony Awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014.
She was married to actor Richard Cromwell for just one year, from 1945 to 1946, but had much better luck with her second marriage. She and Peter Shaw, whose few acting roles included an uncredited appearance in The Bride of Frankenstein, were married from 1949 until he passed away in 2003. Upon their marriage, she became stepmother to Shaw’s son David, and they had two more children together, Anthony and Deirdre.
Lansbury is survived by David, Anthony, and Deirdre, three grandchildren, five great grandchildren, and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury. Our sincere condolences go out to her family, friends, and fans.
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