At the age of 96, Dame Angela Lansbury passed away on Oct. 11. This news comes just five days before the Hollywood star’s 97th birthday.
Dame Angela had a fulfilling acting career on Broadway and in Hollywood that spanned eight decades and granted her five Tony Awards and three Oscar nominations. Angela Lansbury was born in Poplar, East London on Oct. 16, 1925. Her first stage appearance was in a school production of Mary of Scotland. She began to study music and dancing before enrolling in the Webber Douglass Academy of Dramatic Art in 1939. The actress moved with her family to New York where she won a scholarship to the Feagin School of Dramatic Art.
Her career was taken from the stage to Hollywood when she was noticed by a Hollywood executive in 1942 and was given her first role as a maid in the 1944 film Gaslight. She was an instant success, earning an Oscar nomination for her first Hollywood role and securing a valuable contract with MGM. Her success continued with her role as Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray, for which she won a Golden Globe Award and was nominated for another Oscar. Her performance as Eleanor Shaw in the political thriller, The Manchurian Candidate, brought in a third Oscar nomination and solidified her as a strong and versatile actress. By the early 1960s, the was a veteran actress with 24 films, several awards and award nominations, but Angela Lansbury was drawn back to the stage. Her first musical, Anyone Can Whistle, was an experimental Stephan Sondheim project, which ultimately flopped, closing after only nine performances. She continued to receive minor cinema roles but, by the age of 40, she had decided she was not going to achieve superstar success in the cinema and began to look for more serious Broadway roles.
She accepted the part of Madame Dennis in the musical version of Mame, which launched on Broadway in 1966 to rapturous reviews. Lansbury won a Tony Award as Madame Dennis and continued to play her for almost two years before taking a rest. She built on her Broadway career with her role as Nellie Lovett in Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, receiving another Tony Award and sealing her reputation as the grand dame of Broadway. She did not completely abandon the silver screen, continuing her cinema career with Something for Everyone, Bed knobs and Broomsticks and Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Despite being one of Hollywood’s most overlooked actresses, she became one of its richest in the 1980s. In 1984, she took on the role of mystery writer and supersleuth, Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. The show stayed in the top ratings for an unprecedented nine seasons over 12 years. Murder, She Wrote made her one of the wealthiest women in the United States at the time, amassing an estimated fortune of $100 million. She appeared in over 20 films during the 1990s and after 22 years away from Broadway, she returned in a production of Deuce. Lansbury followed this up with her role of Madame Arcati in Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit, winning her fifth Tony Award.
In 2014, she was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) for her services to drama, charitable work and philanthropy. Dame Angela had a fulfilling career, she was nominated for over 45 awards, won seven Tony Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and several Lifetime Achievement Awards, film and drama. Lansbury’s career spanned eight decades and took her well into her 90s with her last official role being a cameo in Rian Johnson’s 2022 detective drama, Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Glass Onion starts streaming on Netflix on Dec. 23 but will be in select theaters before then.
When asked why she continued working long after most actors would have settled for retirement, Dame Angela responded, “I’ve never been particularly aware of my age. It’s like being on a bicycle – I just put my foot down and keep going.” Angela Lansbury lived an incredible life and has left a profound mark on cinema, theatre and many hearts.
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