Angela Lansbury

Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE (16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022) was an Irish-British and American actress and singer who played many film, theatre, and television roles.

Her career, one of the longest in the entertainment industry, spanned over 80 years, much of it in the United States; her work also received much international attention. At the time of her death, she was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. To escape the Blitz, she moved to the United States in 1940, studying acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed to MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in 11 further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finer performances, leading her to her third Academy Award nomination. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her her first Tony Award and established her as a gay icon.

Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television in 1984, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, contributing to animated films like Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Don Bluth's Anastasia (1997). She toured in a variety of international productions and continued to make occasional film appearances such as Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

Lansbury received an Honorary Academy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the BAFTA, a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award and five additional Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She also was nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on 18 occasions, and a Grammy Award. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She was the subject of three biographies.

Early life and childhood

Lansbury was born to an upper middle class family on 16 October 1925 in the district of St Pancras in central London. Her birthplace is sometimes given, wrongly, as Poplar, East London. 

Lansbury says she has ancestral connections to Poplar but she was born in Regent's Park, Central London. Her mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna Macgill (born Charlotte Lillian McIldowie), who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films. Her father was the wealthy English timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar. Her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader and anti-war activist George Lansbury, a man whom she felt "awed" by and considered "a giant in my youth".[9] Angela had an older half sister, Isolde, who was the daughter of Moyna's previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham. In January 1930, when Angela was four, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Bruce and Edgar, leading the Lansburys to move from their Poplar flat to a house in Mill Hill, North London; on weekends they would vacate to a rural farm in Berrick Salome, near Wallingford, Oxfordshire.

"I'm eternally grateful for the Irish side of me. That's where I got my sense of comedy and whimsy. As for the English half–that's my reserved side ... But put me onstage, and the Irish comes out. The combination makes a good mix for acting."

 – Angela Lansbury

When Lansbury was nine, her father died from stomach cancer; she retreated into playing characters as a coping mechanism. Facing financial difficulty, her mother became engaged to a Scottish colonel, Leckie Forbes, and moved into his house in Hampstead, with Lansbury receiving an education at South Hampstead High School from 1934 until 1939. She nevertheless considered herself largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre and cinema. She became a self-professed "complete movie maniac", visiting the cinema regularly and imagining herself as certain characters. Keen on playing the piano, she briefly studied music at the Ritman School of Dancing, and in 1940 began studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington, West London, first appearing onstage as a lady-in-waiting in the school's production of Maxwell Anderson's Mary of Scotland.

That year, Angela's grandfather died, and with the onset of the Blitz, Macgill decided to take Angela, Bruce and Edgar to the United States; Isolde remained in Britain with her new husband, the actor Peter Ustinov. Macgill secured a job supervising 60 British children who were being evacuated to North America aboard the Duchess of Atholl, arriving with them in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in mid-August. From there, she proceeded by train to New York City, where she was financially sponsored by a Wall Street businessman, Charles T. Smith, moving in with his family at their home at Mahopac, New York. Lansbury gained a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing allowing her to study at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, where she appeared in performances of William Congreve's The Way of the World and Oscar Wilde's Lady Windermere's Fan. She graduated in March 1942, by which time the family had moved to a flat in Morton Street, Greenwich Village.

Spouses

• Richard Cromwell, (m. 1945; div. 1946)​
• Peter Shaw, (m. 1949; died 2003)​

Parents

• Edgar Lansbury (father)
• Moyna Macgill (mother)

Family

• Bruce Lansbury (brother)
• Edgar Lansbury (brother)
• George Lansbury (grandfather)
• Dorothy Thurtle (aunt)
• Daisy Postgate (aunt)
• Tamara Ustinov (niece)
• John Postgate (cousin)
• Oliver Postgate (cousin)
• Coral Lansbury (cousin)
• Malcolm Turnbull (distant cousin)
• Peter Ustinov (brother-in-law)

Acting career

Film Career beginnings and breakthrough (1940–1950)

Macgill secured work in a Canadian touring production of Tonight at 8.30, and was joined in Canada by her daughter, who gained her first theatrical job as a nightclub act at the Samovar Club, Montreal. Having gained the job by claiming to be 19 when she was 16, her act consisted of her singing songs by Noël Coward, and earned her $60 a week. She returned to New York City in August 1942, but her mother had moved to Hollywood, Los Angeles, in order to resurrect her cinematic career; Lansbury and her brothers followed. Moving into a bungalow in Laurel Canyon, both Lansbury and her mother obtained Christmas jobs at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles; Moyna was sacked for incompetence, leaving the family to subsist on Lansbury's wages of $28 a week. Befriending a group of gay men, Lansbury became privy to the city's underground gay scene, and with her mother, attended lectures by the spiritual guru Jiddu Krishnamurti; at one of these, she met Aldous Huxley.

At a party hosted by her mother, Lansbury met John van Druten, who had recently co-authored a script for Gaslight (1944), a mystery-thriller based on Patrick Hamilton's 1938 play Gaslight. Set in Victorian London, the film was being directed by George Cukor, and starred Ingrid Bergman in the lead role of Paula Alquist, a woman being psychologically tormented by her husband. Van Druten suggested that Lansbury would be perfect for the role of Nancy Oliver, a conniving cockney maid; she was accepted for the part, although, since she was only 17, a social worker had to accompany her on the set. Obtaining an agent, Earl Kramer, she was signed to a seven-year contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, earning $500 a week and using her real name as her professional name. Already her casting received attention, with Variety magazine in August 1943 claiming Lansbury to have gone from unknown to movie star in just four days. Upon release, Gaslight received mixed critical reviews, although Lansbury's role was widely praised; the film earned seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Best Supporting Actress for Lansbury.

Her next film appearance was as Edwina Brown, the older sister of Velvet Brown in National Velvet (1944); the film proved to be a major commercial hit, with Lansbury developing a lifelong friendship with co-star Elizabeth Taylor. Lansbury next starred in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), a cinematic adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 1890 novel of the same name, which was again set in Victorian London. Directed by Albert Lewin, Lansbury was cast as Sibyl Vane, a working-class music hall singer who falls in love with the protagonist, Dorian Gray (Hurd Hatfield). Although the film was not a financial success, Lansbury's performance once more drew praise, earning her a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture, and she was again nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Awards, losing to Anne Revere, her co-star in National Velvet. 

On September 27, 1945, Lansbury married Richard Cromwell, an artist and decorator whose acting career had come to a standstill. Their marriage was troubled; Cromwell was gay, and had married Lansbury in the unsuccessful hope that doing so would turn him heterosexual. The marriage ended in less than a year when she filed for divorce on September 11, 1946, but they remained friends until his death. In December 1946, she was introduced to fellow English expatriate Peter Pullen Shaw at a party held by former co-star Hurd Hatfield in Ojai Valley. Shaw was an aspiring actor, also signed to MGM, and had recently left a relationship with Joan Crawford. He and Lansbury became a couple, living together before she proposed marriage.

The couple were intent on getting married back in Britain, but the Church of England refused to marry two divorcees. Instead, they wed in a Church of Scotland ceremony at St. Columba's Church in Knightsbridge, London in August 1949, followed by a honeymoon in France. Returning to the U.S., where they settled into Lansbury's home in the Rustic Canyon neighborhood of Los Angeles, close to Santa Monica and the beach, in 1951 both became naturalized U.S. citizens and retained their British citizenship via dual nationality.

Personal life and death

"Ange is classy and elegant, warm and generous, but she's also tough and expects everyone around her to give their all. As far as she is concerned, there is no challenge that can't be at least partially met with a "cuppa" very strong Yorkshire Gold. Working on the stage keeps her vibrant. A healthy regimen keeps her beautiful. What keeps her ageless is her immense curiosity, her exuberance for life, and her tremendous gift for holding on to joy."

 – Friend and co-star Len Cariou, 2012

Speaking to The Dick Cavett Show in 1971, Lansbury said that she spoke with a Cockney English accent when she moved to the United States, but that she since "lost" her original accent. She held Irish citizenship. Biographer Martin Gottfried characterized her as "Meticulous. Cautious. Self-editing. Deliberate. It is what the British call reserved," adding that she was "as concerned, as sensitive, and as sympathetic as anyone might want in a friend". Also noting that she had "a profound sense of privacy", he added that she disliked attempts at flattery.

Lansbury was married twice, first to the actor Richard Cromwell, when she was 19 and Cromwell was 35. Cromwell and Lansbury eloped and were married in a small civil ceremony on September 27, 1945. The marriage ended in divorce in 1946, but they remained friends until his death in 1960. In 1949, she married actor and producer Peter Shaw, and they remained together for 54 years until his death in 2003. She acquired a step-son, David, from Shaw's first marriage. They had two children of their own, Anthony Peter (b. 1952) and Deirdre Ann (b. 1953). While Lansbury repeatedly stated that she wanted to put her children before her career, she admitted that she often had to leave them in California for long periods when she was working elsewhere. She brought up her children to be Episcopalian, although they were not members of a congregation. She has stated that "I believe that God is within all of us, that we are perfect, precious beings, and that we have to put our faith and trust in that."

In the latter part of the 1960s, Anthony and Deirdre became involved in the growing counterculture movement and started using recreational drugs. Deirdre developed an acquaintance with the Manson family, while Anthony became addicted to cocaine and heroin, giving it up in 1971. After recovering, Anthony became a television director and directed 68 episodes of Murder, She Wrote. Deirdre married a chef, and together they opened a restaurant in West Los Angeles. Lansbury had three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren at the time of her death in 2022.

Lansbury was a cousin of the Postgate family, including the animator, writer and social activist Oliver Postgate. She is also a cousin of the academic and novelist Coral Lansbury, whose son is former Prime Minister of Australia Malcolm Turnbull.

As a young actress, Lansbury was a self-professed homebody,[ who commented that she loved housekeeping. She preferred spending quiet evenings inside with friends to the Hollywood night life. Her hobbies at the time included reading, horse riding, playing tennis, cooking, and playing the piano; she also had a keen interest in gardening. She has cited F. Scott Fitzgerald as her favorite author, and cited Roseanne and Seinfeld as being among her favorite television shows. Lansbury was an avid letter writer who wrote letters by hand and made copies of all of them. At Howard Gotlieb's request, Lansbury's papers are housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.

Lansbury was a supporter of the Democratic Party in the US (describing herself as "Democrat from the ground up") and the Labour Party in the UK. Throughout her career, Lansbury supported a variety of charities, particularly those such as Abused Wives in Crisis that combated domestic abuse and those who worked towards rehabilitating drug users. In the 1980s, she began to support a number of charities engaged in the fight against HIV/AIDS.

In early life, Lansbury was a chain smoker. She gave up the addiction in the mid-1960s. In 1976 and 1987, she had cosmetic surgery on her neck to prevent it from broadening with age. During the 1990s, she began to have arthritis. Lansbury underwent hip replacement surgery in May 1994 and knee replacement surgery in 2005.

Lansbury died at 1:30am PDT on 11 October 2022, five days before her 97th birthday, at her home in Los Angeles. Her children issued a statement saying that Lansbury had died "peacefully in her sleep."