Actress Angela Lansbury Dies at 96

Her father died when she was 9, and she later said that she lost herself in characters to deal with her grief. In 1940, at 14, she followed the lead of her mother, also an actor, and began attending a London school for the dramatic arts. But later that same year, she moved to the United States with her family to escape the blitz.

Lansbury earned a scholarship to study acting in New York, and after graduation, she moved to Hollywood, in 1942, and landed the widely praised role in Gaslight. She parlayed her success into a seven-year contract with MGM, beginning with National Velvet, in which she played the older sister of Elizabeth Taylor, who became a lifelong friend, in part because of their shared British origins. (Lansbury became an American citizen in 1951.) 

She nabbed her second Academy Award nod, for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and with it a record for the youngest actress with two academy nominations by age 20.

After her ingenue years, Lansbury, known for her work ethic, became a durable B actress, playing everything from dowagers to cultured heroines to twisted villains, always second to stars such as Judy Garland, Hedy Lamarr and Katharine Hepburn.

A third Oscar nomination came in 1962, for her performance as the calculating mother of Laurence Harvey in the cold war thriller The Manchurian Candidate.

Lansbury was best known for her role as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher on CBS' ‘Murder, She Wrote.’

CBS via Getty Images

Lansbury often played characters who were older than her years. She was only three years older than Harvey, for example, and 10 years older than Elvis Presley when she played his mother in Blue Hawaii (1961).

After a brief marriage to actor Richard Cromwell, at age 19, Lansbury married English actor-producer Peter Shaw, in 1949, and with him had a son, Anthony (who eventually directed 68 episodes of Murder, She Wrote), and daughter, Deirdre. (Lansbury also reared Shaw’s son, David, from a previous marriage.) The marriage lasted until Shaw’s death, in 2003. 

In 1966, Lansbury began her starring run on Broadway, at age 41, with the musical Mame. A biographer, Margaret Bonanno, would write that it made her a “superstar.” But after a series of personal difficulties, including the destruction of her family’s Malibu home in a brush fire, the Shaws moved to County Cork, Ireland, where, Lansbury said, their gardener had no idea who she was. “Nobody there did. I was just Mrs. Shaw, which suited me down to the ground. I had absolute anonymity in those days, which was wonderful.”

She continued working from her base in Ireland until moving into television with Murder, She Wrote, set in the fictional Cabot Cove, Maine, but filmed in Mendocino, California. In their book Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen, Rob Edelman and Audrey E. Kupferberg called the series “a television landmark” for being centered on an older female character. It opened the door for such senior-centric series as The Golden Girls.

In 2014, Queen Elizabeth formally invested Lansbury as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. The honor came on the heels of American awards including the Kennedy Center Honors and the Governor’s Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

She was still acting into her 90s, portraying Aunt March in the PBS miniseries Little Women in 2017. (Lansbury told AARP she got a kick out of playing the ‘crusty’ matriarch.)

“What keeps her ageless is her immense curiosity, her exuberance for life and her tremendous gift for holding on to joy,” her Sweeney Todd costar Len Cariou said in 2012.

She had a cameo in Mary Poppins Returns in 2018, at 93.

“Don’t ever be ready to, quote, retire,” she said then. “Perhaps one should retire. But I’ve never had the chance! I’m always ready for anything, and I think most actors are. We never stop wanting to get out there and do it.”