Remembering Angela Lansbury! Celebrate with Scenes from Her Best Roles
Murder, She Wrote actress dies at 96.
Angela Lansbury, the dynamic singer and actress best known to TV audiences for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, has died. She was 96.
A statement from Lansbury's family posted on Broadway World announced her death: “The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 a.m. today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday."
During her prolific career which spanned seven decades, the actress and singer, who has won an honorary Oscar, five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes and an Olivier Award, and was nominated for 10 Emmys exhibited great skill in masterfully shifting between theater, television and film with artful grace and finesse.
When she was just 18, Angela Lansbury made her screen debut in Gaslight. The rookie actress played a cockney maid opposite Ingrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten. In fact, when filming began the year before, Lansbury was 17. No one was allowed to smoke or swear in front the minor. “Of course the director was the great George Cukor and his language was really ripe and rare and marvelous,” she later told David Letterman. “They literally covered my ears.”
The psychological thriller earned seven Academy Award nominations, including one for Lansbury in her first film role! The following year she earned another Oscar nomination as a sweet singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
With all her projects, did she ever had any career regrets? When David Hartman on Good Morning America asked Lansbury if she wished she had handled things differently, she offered a candid reply. "Say I had a very exciting career at MGM which grew and blossomed... and I had become a great leading lady there and a great movie star. What would have happened to me once I had gone just a little over the edge in my looks and started to deteriorate? I don't think I would have had a career today….,” said Lansbury. “I was never thought of as a leading lady. I've always been a character actress....And I don't really have any regrets about my career... I wonder at certain periods, how I took certain turns, but they were all in the end OK. "
As we remember the iconic actress, take a look back at some of the great roles that Angela Lansbury has played.