By Marilyn Lester***On Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday, the great, much-lauded, award-winning star of stage and screens large and small, Dame Angela Lansbury, died peacefully in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles. Popular and enduring, the outpouring of love and tributes across the show business world and beyond began as news of her death became kn
own. Of her, the late Stephen Sondheim once wrote, “It’s hard to write about her without sounding like her agent. Suffice it to say that every playwright should have her in their play and every theater songwriter should have her in their musical.”—an assessment few would challenge.
The New York Post‘s Johnny Oleksinki called her a “Broadway goddess.” She hosted the Tony Awards more than anyone else and earned six Tony Awards, including a Special Tony for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre in June 2022. She’d been working in Hollywood in film during the 1940s and into the 50s, debuting on the Broadway stage in 1957 with a role in Hotel Paradiso, followed by A Taste of Honey in 1960. A collaboration with Sondheim began in the unsuccessful 1964 musical, Anyone Can Whistle (1964). But it was in 1966 that her Broadway star ascended with Jerome Lawrence, Robert E. Lee and Jerry Herman’s musical Mame—the show that saw her win her first Tony Award win for Leading Actress in a Musical. Seemingly unstoppable on The Great White Way, Dame Angela followed with the role of Countess 
Aurelia in Dear World in 1968, and then went into a revival of Jule Styne and Sondheim’s Gypsy, each one earning her Leading Actress Tony Awards. As if these triumphs weren’t enough, in 1970 she originated the role of Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd, winning her fourth Tony Award for Leading Actress in a Musical.
Then film and television called, and Lansbury took a hiatus from theater, returning to Broadway in 2007 in Terrence McNally’s two-hander Deuce, with the late Marian Seldes, for which received a Tony nomination. Her considerable comic chops were mined as the eccentric Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit (2009), winning yet another Tony Award. She also earned a Tony nomination as matriarch Madame Armfeldt in a 2009 revival of Sondheim and Wheeler’s A Little Night Music. Dame Angela’s final Broadway appearance was in the 2012 revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man.
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London to Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury on October 16, 1925. Fleeing the ravages of a world war, Dame Angela, with her widowed mother and two brothers, arrived at Ellis Island in 1940 to begin life anew in the United States. After a short stint in New York City, the family moved to Los Angeles, where the theatrically-trained Lansbury’s immense talent was immediately recognized—even if initially she was a utility player on the second tier at MGM studios. None the less, as a teenager she was cast in supporting roles in Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray, earning Oscar nominations for her work in both films.
She was Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in “National Velvet,” a saloon singer rival of Judy Garland’s in “The Harvey Girls” and part of a love triangle with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “State of the Union.” Understanding herself as a character actress, and not a glamorous leading lady, she worked steadily, supporting her family, beginning to work in television in the 1950s and ultimately leaving MGM at the end of her 
contract. In 1962 she played what is now an iconic role of the evil mother in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate, before concentrating on stage, even as she continued in film with movies such as Something for Everyone (1970), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story (1983). In 2014, she received an honorary Academy Award for her screen work.
But perhaps her most enduring turn came as mystery writer Jessica Fletcher in the TV series “Murder, She Wrote,” a hugely successful show that ran for 12 seasons, from 1984 to 1996. For that role, Lansbury won four Golden Globe Awards and 12 Emmy nominations. 
Her TV career also included Emmy-nominated roles for a PBS airing of Broadway’s Sweeney Todd (1982) and Little Gloria… Happy at Last (1982), The Blackwater Lightship (2004) and a pair of “Law & Order” episodes in 2005.
Lansbury was briefly married to actor Richard Cromwell from 1945 to 1946. In 1949 she married actor and producer Peter Shaw, who died in 2003.
Perhaps actor Jason Alexander summed up Dame Angela Lansbury to a “T” in this Tweet: “The great Angela Lansbury—one of the most versatile, talented, graceful, kind, witty, wise, classy ladies I’ve ever met has left us. Her huge contribution to the arts and the world remains always.”
In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury.
