From a breakout movie actor at the age of 17 to the acclaimed star of Murder,
She Wrote, Angela Lansbury spent the better part of eight decades
wowing audiences. But success didn't come without its major pitfalls.
After Angela Lansbury and her mother fled Britain
during the Blitz, they eventually made their way to Los Angeles. It was there that the 17-year-old
aspiring actor attended a party where she caught the eye of an MGM executive. He introduced her
to George Cukor, who cast the teenager as Mary the maid in the classic psychological
drama Gaslight. Lansbury told the Daily Mail of her meteoric launch into Hollywood stardom:
"I was wrapping Christmas parcels in a department store one minute,
then playing opposite Ingrid Bergman the next. It was incredible."
She was signed as a contract player,
earning a salary of £125 a week — a considerable sum at the time,
which immediately made her the breadwinner of the family at age 17. While most contract players in
the old Hollywood studio system typically made their way up by appearing in so-called
B movies before being cast in more prestigious fare, Lansbury jumped to the head of the line.
Not only was Gaslight her
first Hollywood movie, it also earned Angela Lansbury her first Oscar nomination. From there,
MGM cast Lansbury in National Velvet, then in an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's The Picture
of Dorian Gray — with the latter earning her a second Academy Award nomination.
While receiving a nomination as a teenager for one's first movie is beyond impressive,
two nominations in a row instantly made her a force to be reckoned with.
The acclaim that Angela Lansbury
experienced from her first two movies placed her in high demand. As her jam-packed roster
of film credits made clear, she cranked out movie after movie for the remainder of the
1940s. Including her 1944 screen debut, between then and the end of the decade,
she made two or three movies a year, ultimately appearing in 13 pictures.
While not all of those movies were of the same caliber as those first three,
Lansbury wound up working with many of the biggest actors in Hollywood during that era,
ranging from Spencer Tracy to Gene Kelly. As she told NPR's Fresh Air,
she was also being cast as characters who were considerably older than she was:
"I was playing older women. So I was never going to get to play the girl
next door. And I was never going to be groomed to be a glamorous movie star."
That can be seen in several of her films during the 1940s. As the Oscars.org website pointed out,
in Frank Capra's State of the Union, Lansbury was just 23 when she portrayed
a 45-year-old newspaper mogul who becomes romantically involved with Spencer Tracy,
then in his late 40s. In addition, just a year later, in Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah,
she played a character older than Hedy Lamarr, although Lamarr was 11 years her senior.
Throughout the 1950s, Angela Lansbury remained an in-demand working actor. However,
the 1950s saw her ping-ponging back and forth between film and the still relatively new
medium of television. Her films during that time were largely forgettable — 1958's The
Long Hot Summer being an exception, although it should also be noted that Lansbury was
credited sixth on the marquee, well below stars Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward.
Everything changed when she was cast in The Manchurian Candidate,
in which she played the domineering, right-wing mother of a Korean War
veteran who's been brainwashed by communists to assassinate the president.
"I want the nominee to be dead about two minutes after he begins his acceptance speech."
Lansbury hit it out of the park, delivering a performance so powerful she was nominated
for her third Oscar — definitely a way to land oneself back on Hollywood's radar.
By the late 1960s, Angela
Lansbury had been witnessing her children, then teenagers, begin to get seduced into
the Hollywood fast lane — her daughter, in fact, had even fallen in with the followers of Charles
Manson. That was why she and her family picked up roots and moved to County Cork,
Ireland in 1970. Lansbury explained in an interview with the Daily Mail:
"Moving to Ireland was like beginning all over again and
it afforded us that time to get back to basics really."
It was during those years that she rediscovered her love of the stage when a local theater
company was looking to land a well-known actor to star in an upcoming production. John O'Shea,
a founding member of Cork's Everyman Theatre, told the Irish Examiner:
"We had heard Angela and her family were living in Conna. It was a bit of a long shot,
but we made contact with her and she jumped at it, no questions asked."
Lansbury also relished the opportunity to live
a life apart from the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. O'Shea told the Irish Examiner:
"Angela would never see herself as a star, she just likes [...] walking down to the shop,
and getting a pint of milk or whatever. She is a very ordinary person who likes to be
just that. The fact that she has this amazing talent and success is kind of by the way."
While Angela Lansbury's screen
credits during the early- to mid-1970s may appear somewhat sparse, that's no reflection on the
amount of work she was doing — she was just doing it on the stage, not the screen. After making her
Broadway debut in 1957, Lansbury continued to appear in Broadway shows, regularly if somewhat
sporadically, starring in A Taste of Honey in 1960, Anyone Can Whistle, in 1964, Mame in 1966,
for which she won her first Tony Award, and Dear World in 1969, in which she won Tony number two.
In the following decade, she returned to Broadway with a vengeance, headlining a string of hits that
were highlighted by the 1974 revival of Gypsy, and her Tony-winning role in Sweeney Todd,
which opened in 1979 — each of which won her Tony Awards. Her next Tony came three decades later,
when she won her fifth for Blythe Spirit in 2009. This was capped off in 2022,
when the Tonys honored her with a special Lifetime Achievement Award.
In 1984, Angela
Lansbury stepped into the role that would define her for the next decade and beyond:
sleuthing mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher in CBS drama Murder, She Wrote.
"Look, I have got a book to finish and it has to be finished tonight."
The show proved to be wildly popular with viewers, as the series spent 11 of its 12 seasons cozily
enmeshed within the top 20 in the all-important Nielsen ratings. Interestingly enough, Murder She
Wrote wasn't meant to be a vehicle for Lansbury but had originally been written with All in the
Family star Jean Stapleton in mind. As Lansbury explained in a 1984 interview with People,
when Stapleton was reluctant to step into another series, having just lost her husband,
Lansbury immediately connected with the character. Lansbury told the outlet:
"When I read it, I felt that [series creator Peter Fischer's] script could
have been written for me. Besides, there are so few decent roles for women on television,
and I was immediately taken by Jessica."
While Lansbury had to adjust to the relentless pace of television,
she also recognized an opportunity that simply could not be ignored. She told People:
"I felt that it would have been a gap in my acting experience if I had never
done a television series. I wanted to play to that huge audience just once."
While in the midst of playing Jessica Fletcher
on Murder She Wrote, Angela Lansbury proved she wasn't done with creating iconic performances
when she signed on to voice a talking, singing teapot in Disney's animated musical Beauty and
the Beast. In the role of Mrs. Potts, Lansbury's musical theater background shone through in her
performances of such songs as "A Tale as Old as Time," and the show-stopping "Be Our Guest."
The film proved to be a massive hit, earning $424 million at the international box office, according
to Box Office Mojo. Over time, Lansbury came to recognize how large the film loomed in her career.
At an event honoring the film's 25th anniversary, Lansbury told a red carpet interviewer:
"[Beauty and the Beast has] never been very far away from me. It will be remembered,
I think, as one of the great movies that I've been involved with."
Lansbury also understood just how significant Mrs. Potts had become in her own body of work, adding:
"Among the movies that I will be remembered for, I'd say this is No. 1 or 2, anyway, absolutely."
After two back-to-back Oscar
nominations in 1944 and 1945, and another in 1962, winning one of those prestigious
gold statues had eluded Angela Lansbury. In 2013, however, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and
Sciences decided to right that particular wrong by presenting her with the Governor's honorary
Oscar recognizing her lifetime achievement in the movies. In her tear-filled acceptance speech,
Lansbury reflected on being able to work with — and learn from — some of the world's most
talented actors over the course of a career spanning decades. She told the audience,
"You know, during the long course of my career in film, and television,
and theater, I have known and worked with the very best of their time."
She concluded by referencing her own experience as
a multiple Oscar nominee who'd never actually won, telling the audience,
"You can't imagine how happy and proud indeed I feel, really underserving of this gorgeous
golden chap ... and to be here in the company of my beloved family and friends, instead of
sitting shivering with hope and disappointment in Grauman's Chinese Theatre in the 1940s and '60s."
While receiving an Academy
Award is about as prestigious as it gets for any actor, Angela Lansbury managed
to top herself the following year when she received a Damehood — the female equivalent
of a knighthood — from Queen Elizabeth II. Lansbury told Sky News at the time,
"It is a very proud day for me to be recognized by the country of my birth,
and to meet the Queen under these circumstances is a rare and lovely occasion."
She also pointed out just how different that
becoming Dame Angela was from being awarded an Oscar, telling Sky News,
"One [the Oscar] is for my work in motion pictures, and this is for the
overall accomplishments of my life as an actress."
She also offered her gratitude for a career that has given her the opportunity to enjoy
life in America, her adopted home for the bulk of her life, while still maintaining her ties
with the U.K., where she was born and raised. Speaking of her career, Lansbury told the outlet:
"It has afforded me the joy of working in America and also in England a great deal."
Retirement was never something
Angela Lansbury had pondered, and she continued working into her 80s and 90s.
"I really feel I have as much energy, certainly in the morning, as I ever have had."
In fact, her final roles included a 2014 stage production of Driving Miss Daisy
co-starring with James Earl Jones. She also played Aunt March in the 2017 television
miniseries Little Women. Furthermore, Lansbury had small but memorable roles
in Nanny McPhee and Mary Poppins Returns, both of which were released in 2018.
Even after her death, Dame Angela had one more sweet surprise for fans. In 2010,
she sat down for an interview with the The New York Times for what she intended to be
her final interview, instructing that the interview not be made public until she was
gone. The Times released the video 12 years later on the day of Lansbury's death. "What
would you like your legacy to be?" Lansbury is asked for her final question. She responded:
"That through my acting I enabled people to get out of their own lives. To be
transported into other areas of life that they otherwise would never have. I'd love
to be able to feel that I enabled people to do that. Life is so hard for so many people."