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Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born October 16, 1925) is an Oscar-nominated English-American actress.
Early lifeLansbury was born in London, the daughter of a Belfast-born actress, Moyna MacGill and the granddaughter of Labour politician George Lansbury. At age 14 , when World War II began, she emigrated with her mother to the United States and became a naturalised citizen in 1951.
As a struggling young actress in Los Angeles, Lansbury worked at the Bullocks Wilshire department store.
CareerLansbury made her Academy Award nominated film debut in 1944 as an impertinent maid in the film Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This was followed by another Oscar nomination for her role as Sibyl Vane in film adaptation of the Oscar Wilde novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). She has since enjoyed a long and varied career, mainly as a film actress, appearing in everything from Samson and Delilah (1949) to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
Lansbury was in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as the initially merely overbearing mother of a brainwashed assassin whose evil only grows through the course of the film. She won much well-deserved praise for her chilling performance, and won a third Oscar nomination. In the film, Lansbury's son was played by Laurence Harvey, who was only three years younger than she. Lansbury has been quoted in an interview with CNN's Larry King as saying that this was her favorite of her many film roles.
promotional poster for the 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray, featuring a young Angela Lansbury as Sibyl Vane.She played Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980). She then turned to character voice work in animated films like The Last Unicorn (1982), winning a great deal of praise for her affectionate turn as the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit Beauty and the Beast (1991). She reprised the role as Mrs. Potts in the Square-Enix/Disney video game Kingdom Hearts II in 2006, and also did character work as the Dowager Empress in the less well-received animated film Anastasia in 1997.
On Broadway, Lansbury received good reviews from her very first musical outing, the short-lived 1964 Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle, which co-starred Lee Remick. Starting in 1966, her long-running portrayal as Jerry Herman's Mame, opposite Bea Arthur as Vera, earned Lansbury her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Subsequent Tony awards were earned for Dear World (1969) and the first Broadway revival of Gypsy (1974). She is a two-time winner of the Sarah Siddons Award (1975 & 1980) for dramatic achievement in Chicago theatre. Her English music-hall turn as meat-pie entrepreneuse Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim's ballad opera Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street earned her yet another Tony Award in 1979. She has received a Tony nomination for every lead role she has essayed on Broadway, and won each time (total of 4 times), unlike her unlucky record at the Oscars.
As Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984 - 1996), she found her biggest success and a worldwide following. It was to be one of the longest running prime time detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world and a record as the most nominated lead actress without a win in the prime time Emmy awards (with 12 nominations).
In the early 1990s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom awarded Angela Lansbury the CBE. She was named a Disney Legend in 1995. She received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.
Private lifeLansbury was briefly married from 1945-46 to American actor Richard Cromwell when she was 19 and Cromwell was 35. In 1948, Lansbury remarried, to Irish-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw, who had been a former boyfriend of the much-older actress, Joan Crawford. Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Ms. Lansbury's career. Until Shaw's death in 2003, Lansbury enjoyed one of the longest and most prolific of show-business marriages.
Lansbury is the mother of two, stepmother of one, and a proud grandmother several times over. Her son, Antony, was producer/director of Murder She Wrote, and is today a television executive. Lansbury's daughter, Deirdre Angela Shaw Battarrais, who beat a serious drug addiction with her devoted mother's help (Lansbury moved to rural Ireland from California to escape the scourge of drugs) and is today, along with her Italian-born husband Enzo, the co-manager of a popular cafe, Ristorante Positano, in West Los Angeles, California. However, her devotion to her daughter may be put into question by the fact that in the '60s she gave her daughter written permission to travel with the Manson Family.
Lansbury was related by her half-sister Isolde's marriage to the late British actor, Sir Peter Ustinov; the two in-laws appeared together professionally just once in 1978's Death on the Nile. Lansbury is today related -- by the marriage of her nephew David Lansbury -- to the American actress Ally Sheedy. A footnote is that one of Ms. Lansbury's two twin brothers, Edgar Lansbury, was the producer of Godspell, the smash-hit broadway musical, in the 1970s.
Today, Lansbury, a longtime resident of Brentwood, California takes time to support various philanthropic groups. Lansbury was the Guest of Honor at the 14th annual Gala and Fundraiser on April 16, 2005 for Women in Recovery, Inc., a Venice, California-based non-profit organization offering a live-in, 12-Step program of rehabilitation for women in need. Past Honorees of this organization have included Jamie Lee Curtis and Sir Anthony Hopkins.
Lansbury had knee replacement surgery on July 14, 2005 (see [1]).
Lansbury also enjoys vacation time regularly at her home in County Cork, Ireland.
Filmography Gaslight (1944)
National Velvet (1944)
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
The Harvey Girls (1946)
The Hoodlum Saint (1946)
Till the Clouds Roll By (1946)
The Private Affairs of Bel Ami (1947)
If Winter Comes (1947)
State of the Union (1948)
The Three Musketeers (1948)
Tenth Avenue Angel (1948)
The Red Danube (1949)
Samson and Delilah (1949)
Kind Lady (1951)
Mutiny (1952)
Remains to Be Seen (1953)
A Life at Stake (1954)
The Purple Mask (1955)
A Lawless Street (1955)
The Court Jester (1956)
Please Murder Me (1956)
The Long, Hot Summer (1958)
The Reluctant Debutante (1958)
Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959)
The Dark at the Top of the Stairs (1960)
A Breath of Scandal (1960)
Blue Hawaii (1961)
Four Horseman of the Apocalypse (1962) (dubbed speaking voice for Ingrid Thulin for a few scenes)
All Fall Down (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
In the Cool of the Day (1963)
The World of Henry Orient (1964)
Dear Heart (1964)
The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965)
The Amorous Adventures of Moll Flanders (1965)
Harlow (1965)
Mister Buddwing (1966)
Something for Everyone (1970)
Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971)
Death on the Nile (1978)
The Lady Vanishes (1979)
The Mirror Crack'd (1980)
The Last Unicorn (1982) (voice)
The Pirates of Penzance (1983)
The Company of Wolves (1984)
Ingrid (1985) (documentary)
Beauty and the Beast (1991) (voice)
Your Studio and You (1995) (short subject)
Anastasia (1997) (voice)
Fantasia 2000 (1999) (voice)
About Schmidt (2002) (voice; uncredited)
Broadway: The Golden Age, by the Legends Who Were There (2003) (documentary)
Nanny McPhee (2005)
Kingdom Hearts II (2006) (Video game, voice)
Television WorkThe Story of the First Christmas Snow (1975)
Sweeney Todd (1982)
Little Gloria... Happy at Last (1982)
The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story (1983)
A Talent for Murder (1984)
Lace (1984)
The First Olympics: Athens 1896 (1984)
The Murder of Sherlock Holmes (1984) (pilot for Murder, She Wrote)
Murder, She Wrote (1984-1996)
Rage of Angels: The Story Continues (1986)
Shootdown (1988)
The Shell Seekers (1989)
The Love She Sought (1990)
Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris (1992)
Mrs. Santa Claus (1996)
Murder, She Wrote: South by Southwest (1997)
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax (1999)
Murder, She Wrote: A Story to Die For (2000)
Murder, She Wrote: The Last Free Man (2001)
Murder, She Wrote: The Celtic Riddle (2003)
The Blackwater Lightship (2004)
Law and Order (2005) (Guest Appearance)
Broadway Stage Performances
Hotel Paradiso (Apr. - Jul. 1957)
A Taste of Honey (Oct. 1960 - Sep. 1961)
Anyone Can Whistle (Apr. 1964)
Mame (May 1966 - Jan. 1969)
Dear World (Feb. - May 1969)
Gypsy (Sep. 1974 - Jan. 1975)
The King and I (May 1977 - Dec. 1978)
Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (Mar. 1979 - Jun. 1980)
A Little Family Business (Dec. 1982)
Mame (Jul. - Aug. 1983)
Short Talks on the Universe (Nov. 2002)
Oscar and the Pink Lady (Mar. 2006)
Awards
The Most Excellent Order of the British Empire
Awarded the CBE in the 1990's which was bestowed upon her by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
Academy AwardsNominated:
Best Supporting Actress (Gaslight, 1945)
Best Supporting Actress (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1946)
Best Supporting Actress (The Manchurian Candidate, 1963)
BAFTA AwardsWon:
Britannia Award (Lifetime Achievement, 2003)
Nominated:
Best Supporting Actress (Death on the Nile, 1978)
Emmy AwardsNominated:
Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series (for playing Eleanor Duvall in "Law & Order: Trial by Jury", 2005)
Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie (The Blackwater Lightship, 2004)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1996)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1995)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1994)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1993)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1992)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1991)
Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 43rd Annual Tony Awards", 1990)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1990)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1989)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1988)
Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 41st Annual Tony Awards", 1987)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1987)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1986)
Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program (Sweeney Todd, 1985)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1985)
Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie (Little Gloria... Happy at Last, 1983)
Golden GlobesWon:
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1992)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1990)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1987)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1985)
Best Supporting Actress (The Manchurian Candidate, 1963)
Best Supporting Actress (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1946)
Nominated:
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1995)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1993)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1991)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1989)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1988)
Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1986)
Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Miniseries or TV-Movie (A Gift of Love: A Christmas Story, 1983)
Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, 1972)
Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy (Something for Everyone, 1970)
National Board of ReviewBest Supporting Actress (Death on the Nile, 1978)
Best Supporting Actress (All Fall Down and The Manchurian Candidate, 1962)
Tony AwardsWon:
Best Actress (Mame, 1966)
Best Actress (Dear World, 1969)
Best Actress (Gypsy, 1975)
Best Actress (Sweeney Todd, 1979)
References in Popular Culture
Angela Lansbury has been namechecked in the following films and tv series:
I Know What You Did Last Summer
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