Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury (16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022) was an English-American actress and singer whose career spanned eight decades on stage, film, and television.
Born in London, she was moved to New York City in 1940 to avoid German air raids. Her first film roles were in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), both of which earned her Academy Award nominations for Best Supporting Actress (at age 20, she was – and still is – the youngest actress with two nominations). She went on to extensive and acclaimed work in film, television, and theatre, in the process earning another Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, seven Tony Award nominations (winning two), fifteen Golden Globe nominations (winning six), and eighteen Primetime Emmy Award nominations. In 1994, Lansbury was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 2013, she received an Honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement.
Additional memorable roles came in such films as National Velvet, The Harvey Girls, Nanny McPhee, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Beauty and the Beast, The Court Jester and The Manchurian Candidate. On Broadway, she won acclaim in Mame, Gypsy and Sweeney Todd. On television, she is best known for starring as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. She's also noteworthy as the only individual to have an original song written for her from four of Disney's most famous songwriters: "The Age of Not Believing" from Bedknobs and Broomsticks (by The Sherman Brothers) and "Beauty and the Beast" from Beauty and the Beast (by Howard Ashman and Alan Menken; she also recorded the entire song in one take – after turning up late for the session, due to her flight being interrupted by a bomb threat – and reduced everyone in the studio to tears).
Her paternal grandfather was British politician George Lansbury, who led the Labour Party in the 1930s. Her first cousin, writer and animator Oliver Postgate, created some of Britain's most beloved children's television programmes ever in the 1950s-70s, including The Saga of Noggin the Nog, Ivor the Engine, The Clangers and Bagpuss.
Emma Thompson apparently once threw a pie at her and Angela "spent the rest of the day throwing food at people", after bursting out laughing after being hit by said pie.
She passed away on October 11, 2022, five days short of her 97th birthday.
Roles on TV Tropes:
- Gaslight (1944) as Nancy Oliver
- National Velvet (1944) as Edwina Brown
- The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) as Sibyl Vane
- The Harvey Girls (1946) as Em
- State of the Union (1948) as Kay Thorndyke
- The Three Musketeers (1948) as Queen Anne of France
- Samson and Delilah (1949) as Semadar
- The Court Jester (1956) as Princess Gwendolyn
- Please Murder Me! (1956) as Myra Leeds
- The Long, Hot Summer (1958) as Minnie Littlejohn
- Summer of the Seventeenth Doll (1959) as Pearl
- A Breath Of Scandal (1960) as Countess Lina
- Blue Hawaii (1961) as Sarah Lee Gates
- The Manchurian Candidate (1962) as Mrs. Eleanor Iselin
- The World of Henry Orient (1964) as Isabel Boyd
- The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965) as Claudia Procula
- Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) as Miss Eglantine Price
- Death on the Nile (1978) as Salome Otterbourne
- The Lady Vanishes (1979) as Miss Froy
- The Mirror Crack'd (1980) as Miss Marple
- The Last Unicorn (1982) as Mommy Fortuna (voice)
- The Pirates of Penzance (1983) as Ruth
- The Company of Wolves (1984) as Granny
- Beauty and the Beast (1991) as Mrs. Potts (voice)
- Mrs. Santa Claus (1996) as Mrs. Santa Claus
- Anastasia (1997) as Dowager Empress Maria Feodorovna (voice)
- Fantasia 2000 (2000) as herself – The Firebird introduction
- Nanny McPhee (2005) as Great Aunt Adelaide
- Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) as Mrs. Selma Van Gundy
- Justin and the Knights of Valour (2013) as The Witch (voice)
- The Grinch (2018) as Mayor McGerkle (voice)
- Mary Poppins Returns (2018) as Balloon Lady
- Buttons (2018) as Rose
- Glass Onion (2022) as herself (posthumous release)
- Playhouse 90 (2 episodes, 1958–59) as Hazel Wills / Victoria Atkins
- The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1 episode, 1965) as Elfie von Donck
- Lace (1984) as Aunt Hortense Boutin
- Murder, She Wrote (1984–96) as Jessica Fletcher
- Magnum, P.I. (1 episode, 1986)
- Newhart (1 episode, 1990) as Herself
- Touched by an Angel (1 episode, 2002) as Lady Berrington
- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1 episode, 2005) as Eleanor Duvall
- Law & Order: Trial by Jury (1 episode, 2005)
- Mame (1966–68, 1983) as Mame Dennis
- Gypsy (1973–75) as Rose Hovick
- Hamlet (1975–76) as Gertrude
- The King and I (1978) as Anna Leonowens
- Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979–81) as Mrs. Nellie Lovett
- Blithe Spirit (2009, 2014–15) as Madame Arcati
- A Little Night Music (2009–10) as Madame Armfeldt
- Driving Miss Daisy (2013) as Miss Daisy Werthan
- The Importance of Being Earnest (2019) as Lady Bracknell (stage reading)
Her career provides examples of:
- Blonde Republican Sex Kitten: Possibly the Trope Maker in State of the Union (1948). Ironically, in real life, she was a lifelong Democrat.
- Career Resurrection: She debuted in Hollywood with a bang, earning Oscar nominations for Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and was a critical darling. However, MGM miscast her in several films, leading her to break her contract. She struggled in minor roles in several B-movies of decreasing quality. It wasn't until The Reluctant Debutante and The Long Hot Summer that she returned to prominence. And then The Manchurian Candidate solidified her star status.
- Cool Old Lady: She was already nearly sixty when she began playing Jessica Fletcher and her coolness didn't fade in the slightest with age, on screen or off.
- Creator Backlash:
- Said of her early years at MGM, "I kept wanting to play the Jean Arthur roles, and Mr. Mayer kept casting me as a series of venal bitches."
- Described The Purple Mask as the worst movie she ever made.
- She also disowned In the Cool of the Day.
- Evil Matriarch: In The Manchurian Candidate. Also The World of Henry Orient, where she's not so much evil, but a hypocrite who's a Jerkass to her troubled daughter.
- Executive Meddling: She fought the network's attempts to put Jessica Fletcher into a relationship, wanting her to remain a strong single woman.
- Fake American: As Em in The Harvey Girls.
- Grande Dame: In Nanny McPhee.
- Hollywood Old: She was frequently cast as characters older than her actual age before she became genuinely elderly.
- The Ingenue: In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).
- I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: She brought many of her old co-stars from past films and her time on Broadway to do guest posts on Murder, She Wrote to boost their careers and help them out financially, knowing they would get good royalties from it's popularity and being used on reruns.
- Kindly Housekeeper: In Beauty and the Beast.
- Little Old Lady Investigates: Her role on Murder, She Wrote and in The Mirror Crack'd as well as a 1999 Made-for-TV Movie based on the Mrs. Pollifax books. For this reason, her character Jessica Fletcher is often considered an American equivalent to Miss Marple.
- Money, Dear Boy: Her reason for being in Blue Hawaii - "I was desperate."
- Non-Singing Voice: She was dubbed by Virginia Rees in The Harvey Girls. This was apparently because her voice was thought to be unsuitable for a lowlife saloon singer.
- Playing Against Type: It might surprise younger fans to discover that Lansbury was typecast as bitches and villains for most of her career. Her most famous roles among modern audiences are as Cool Old Lady Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast, Magical Nanny Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks and of course spunky detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote."Hollywood made me old before my time."
- Really Gets Around: Anyone who is familiar with Lansbury from Murder She Wrote or her later stage and film work may be startled to watch Gaslight and see a 17-year-old Lansbury as a saucy, slutty housemaid.
- So My Kids Can Watch: She called her role as Mrs. Potts a "present to [her] grandchildren".
- Sorcerer's Apprentice Plot: Bedknobs and Broomsticks.
- The Vamp: In Gaslight.
- What Could Have Been:
- She was seriously considered for the title role of Mary Poppins before Julie Andrews was finally cast. She did later star in a similarly magical role as Miss Eglantine Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, which shared a Production Posse with the earlier film. Julie Andrews had also turned down the lead. Additionally, Lansbury did make it into Mary Poppins Returns, as the Balloon Lady.
- She was Bryan Fuller's first choice for the role of Hannibal Lecter's psychiatrist in Hannibal, but she was already committed to a production of Driving Miss Daisy, so the character was rewritten from being an octogenarian to a fortysomething woman when Gillian Anderson was cast.
- In the '80s she was offered two TV roles: a sitcom and a detective series. Obviously, she chose the latter.
