Angela Lansbury, star of stage and screen best known to television audiences as mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote and who gave voice to the title tune in Beauty and the Beast, died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.
“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” her family said in a statement.
Lansbury was a highly decorated actress. She was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2014 to celebrate her seven-decade film career, and she won six Tony awards, including this year’s Lifetime Achievement Awards for her work on the stage. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her work on the 1993 soundtrack for Beauty and the Beast, in which she voiced Mrs. Potts.
While she was most well-known for her TV work, the actress never took home an Emmy despite receiving a record 18 nominations, including one for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series for each of Murder, She Wrote’s 12 seasons. She also won six Golden Globe awards.
“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher is that I could do what I do best and [play someone I have had] little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman,” Lansbury once said, according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Mostly, I’ve played very spectacular bitches. Jessica has extreme sincerity, compassion, extraordinary intuition. I’m not like her. My imagination runs riot. I’m not a pragmatist. Jessica is.”
Born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, Lansbury’s family moved to New York City during World War II. She moved on to Hollywood in 1942, and before turning 20, she had filmed Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Lansbury received Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for both, and won her first Golden Globe for Gray.
Though she landed a contract with MGM, Lansbury felt the studio did not support her for the roles she craved to play because they didn’t think she was glamorous or famous enough. “I had the ability but I didn’t have the name,” she told London’s The Telegraph in February of 2014. “They could have built me, which is what they did with Deborah Kerr, but I don’t think I was quite hot enough in the looks department, quite frankly. I was all talent and no looks.”
She persevered in film and eventually earned her third Oscar nomination for her role as the formidable Eleanor Iselin in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, co-starring Frank Sinatra. Other notable movies included State of the Union with Spencer Tracy, The Harvey Girls with Judy Garland and playing Elvis Presley’s mother in Blue Hawaii.
Unfortunately the roles that followed left her disillusioned with her big-screen options, so she turned her attention to the theater. At 40 years old, Lansbury’s first major Broadway role was the lead in a 1966 production of Mame, which featured the holiday favorite “We Need a Little Christmas” and led to her first Tony win.
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She went on to co-host the Tony Awards telecast in 1968, and was named Woman of the Year by the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club the same year.
She returned to the screen for the 1971 Disney favorite Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which combined live action and animation. She would re-team with the studio two decades later to voice one of her most indelible roles, Mrs. Potts in the Oscar-nominated 1991 blockbuster Beauty and the Beast, and was eventually enshrined as a Disney Legend in 1995.
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All of the success was in stark contrast to the drama in her personal life: In 1970, her Malibu home burned down, and she learned both her children were addicted to drugs. “We were so shocked because during that era, there was nowhere to go, nobody to consult, no way to help them,” she told the Telegraph in 2014. She and her husband moved the family to Ireland to help her son and daughter deal with their addictions.
Lansbury worked steadily in movies and TV for the next decade before deciding to take on the lead role in CBS’s new drama Murder, She Wrote in 1984. The series, which followed widowed schoolteacher-turned-bestselling detective novelist and amateur crime solver Jessica Fletcher, ran for 12 seasons and was a top 20 show for all but one. Lansbury eventually became an executive producer on the series, and maintained the show was a hit because, as she told the Daily Mail, “there was never any blood, never any violence. And there was always a satisfying conclusion to a whodunit. The jigsaw was complete. And I loved Jessica’s everywoman character. I think that’s what made her so acceptable to an across-the-board audience.”
Murder, She Wrote’s ratings slipped in its final season, when CBS moved it to a Thursday night time slot, where it aired opposite Friends, but the series was followed by four TV movies, a pair of video games and a spin-off series of novels.
Following the end of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury returned to theater work, earning her fifth Tony Award for Blithe Spirit, and two more nominations for Deuce and A Little Night Music. Her eclectic résumé led her to receive two stars on the Walk of Fame — one for her movie work and one for her TV work — and, in 2014, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.
The actress, who divorced first husband Dick Cromwell after less than a year of marriage in 1946, was married to producer Peter Shaw from 1949 to his death in 2003. She is survived by her daughter, Deirdre, and son, Anthony.
