Angela Lansbury’s Marriage and Family With Late Husband Peter Shaw: ‘My Dear Loving Husband’

In addition to her success in the entertainment world, Angela Lansbury is remembered for her life-long devotion to her family.

On Tuesday, Lansbury’s three children announced that she died overnight in her sleep at her Los Angeles home. She was 96.

“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,” her family announced Tuesday in a statement obtained by PEOPLE.

“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,” the statement adds. “She was proceeded in death by her husband of 53 years, Peter Shaw. A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.”

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Lansbury married Shaw, an actor who later became a prominent Hollywood agent, in London in 1949, after her first marriage to actor Richard Cromwell resulted in a divorce just nine months later.

Lansbury remained married to Shaw until his death in 2003, and the couple shared three children together: Shaw’s son David, as well as their children Anthony (born 1952) and Deirdre (born 1953).

“Frankly I wish I had spent more time with my family and less time making mediocre movies in those days,” Lansbury told PEOPLE of becoming a mother while working as an actress in a 1984 interview.

The interview noted that her husband-manager, “checks the dailies, handles the personal affairs and even cooks dinner” while she worked on CBS’ Murder, She Wrote.

Lansbury referred to Shaw as “my dear, loving husband” to PEOPLE in 1984 and spoke about her family’s decision to move to County Cork, Ireland in 1971.

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“Both of my children, but particularly my son, became involved with drugs,” she told PEOPLE at the time. “Malibu, where we lived in the 1960s, was a hotbed of youthful drug abuse—to these kids it was as common as bubble gum. Peter and I were the typical Eisenhower-years couple during the ’50s. But the 1960s were shattering to us as a family.”

“Everything was telling me to take my family and get away, so I did,” Lansbury told PEOPLE at the time.

“It was one of the happiest decisions of my life. It was one of the last places on earth that was fairly drug free,” she added. “It was also a spiritual home for me. I bought an old stone house, on 20 acres of land, that had been built for a vicar in 1825. There were elm trees 300 years old, a river running down in back and lovely Victorian gardens all around. We had a wonderful life.”

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Lansbury told PEOPLE at the time that the move helped Anthony regain his health and resulted in Shaw’s retirement in 1972 so he could live with the family in Ireland permanently.

Lansbury said at the time that the move offered her an opportunity to “step back in time” to the days of her youth in London before World War II, as she viewed Ireland as “40 or 50 years behind the rest of Europe.”

“No one, including my dear loving husband, understood exactly what I was doing. But I was reliving childhood fantasies,” Lansbury told PEOPLE in 1984. “Paddy O’Brien and I planted new gardens every season, and I took long walks with my children in the lovely Irish countryside. I seriously thought I would give up my career and just enjoy life.”

Lansbury and Shaw sold their home in Ireland in 1979; their son Anthony went on to direct Lansbury in 68 episodes of Murder, She Wrote, according to a 1996 New York Times story.

Shaw told PEOPLE in 1992 that he felt it was “awfully hard to tell the difference between” Lansbury herself and her iconic Murder, She Wrote character Jessica Fletcher.

“Angela has that marvelous gumption, and that’s one of the nice things that Jessica has,” Shaw said at the time.