Lansbury, Angela

▪ American actress

born October 16, 1925, London, Eng.

      British-born American character actress who achieved success and acclaim for her stage, film, and television work.

      Lansbury and her widowed mother, actress Moyna MacGill, emigrated from England to the United States in 1940. From 1940 to 1942 Lansbury studied acting at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio in New York City. Her film debut came in the psychological thriller Gaslight (1944), and her performance as a devious Cockney maid earned her an Oscar nomination for best supporting actress. She next appeared as Elizabeth Taylor (Taylor, Dame Elizabeth)'s snobbish sister in National Velvet (1944), and she received another Oscar nomination the following year for her supporting performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). She played wicked or virtuous characters with equal aplomb and displayed her versatility in such films as The Harvey Girls (1946), State of the Union (1948), and The Three Musketeers (1948). She continued to essay memorable character roles during the 1950s, most notably in A Lawless Street (1955), The Court Jester (1956), and The Long, Hot Summer (1958). Her most acclaimed screen performance came as Laurence Harvey's evil, incestuous mother in director John Frankenheimer's Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). For this film Lansbury received her third Oscar nomination.

      Although Lansbury achieved a measure of success in films, it was the Broadway stage that provided her with the roles that made her a frontline star. She made her Broadway debut in the Georges Feydeau (Feydeau, Georges) farce Hotel Paradiso (1957) and had leading roles in Shelagh Delaney (Delaney, Shelagh)'s A Taste of Honey (1960) and the Stephen Sondheim (Sondheim, Stephen) musical Anyone Can Whistle (1964). Her breakthrough came in the title role of the Jerry Herman musical Mame (1966), for which she won her first Tony Award. Carrying on in the tradition of Ethel Merman (Merman, Ethel) and Mary Martin (Martin, Mary), Lansbury reigned supreme as queen of Broadway for several years and won three additional Tony Awards for her roles in Dear World (1969), Gypsy (1975), and Sweeney Todd (1979).

      Her many successes notwithstanding, Lansbury's greatest popular triumph came when she was chosen for the leading role of mystery author Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons beginning in 1984. Lansbury was made executive producer of the show in 1992, and she continued to appear occasionally as Jessica Fletcher in TV movies for years after the series had officially ended. Lansbury is also a renowned voice-over artist and has lent her vocal skills to such animated features as The Last Unicorn (1982), Beauty and the Beast (1991), Anastasia (1997), and Fantasia 2000 (1999).

Additional Reading

Rob Edelman and Audrey E. Kupferberg, Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen, rev. and updated (1999); Martin Gottfried, Balancing Act: The Authorized Biography of Angela Lansbury (1999).

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