For Angela Lansbury, who has died at 96, ‘Murder, She Wrote’ was renewed stardom for an already starry career

The first memory I have of seeing Angela Lansbury perform was on Broadway as the dazzling and outsized title character in the 1983 revival of “Mame.” She was glorious.

A year later, there she was on CBS starring in “Murder, She Wrote” and playing a decidedly different character: The practical and always incisive Jessica Fletcher, who was the opposite of the grandiose Auntie Mame. Lansbury was nearly 60 when she started the series, playing the mystery writer and amateur sleuth from Cabot Cove, Maine, and it was a late-in-life infusion of stardom for a career that had long already made its mark.

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Lansbury died Tuesday at the age of 96 — just five days shy of her 97th birthday.

Her talents were varied. For her work on Broadway, she won multiple Tony Awards, including one for the devilish pie-maker Nellie Lovett in “Sweeney Todd” in 1979. Her film career spanned everything from “Gaslight” in 1944 to “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962 to “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” in 1971 to the singing teapot in the animated “Beauty and the Beast” in 1991.

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But it is “Murder, She Wrote” that I find myself returning to, again and again.

You can find it in endless reruns, or streaming on Peacock. Last year I spoke with showrunner Tom Sawyer about why the series, which ran from 1984 to 1996, worked — and still works — so well.

“Certainly having Angela as the lead didn’t hurt,” Sawyer said. “In my career up to that point, I was writing for a lot of mediocre actors. So when I got a chance to write for Angela I felt like … what an honor.”

From left: Linda Purl, Angela Lansbury and Wayne Rogers in an episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” (CBS Photo Archive / CBS via Getty Images)

Smart and no-nonsense, Jessica is cosmopolitan despite that small town mailing address — so much so that she eventually acquired Manhattan pied-à-terre. Even 30-some years later, you realize that she was costumed with an eye toward timelessness. She never looks fussy. In Cabot Cove, it’s preppy sweaters and jeans. When she’s jet-setting to parts unknown, she has a suitcase full of well-tailored skirt suits and evening wear. Her hairstyle is unchanging and yet that, too, never looks dated. I can’t stress how unique this is from anything else filmed during this period.

I’ve never been able to suss out how old she’s supposed to be on the show, but Lansbury herself was in her 60s and early 70s when she shot “Murder, She Wrote.” Consider that in contrast to the equally lively but definitively “retired” framework given to the characters on “The Golden Girls,” which also aired in the ‘80s.

Jessica isn’t easily shocked — by affairs or theft or anything else for that matter — and sees phonies for who they are. She never doubts her self-worth or her instincts and she doesn’t let fame go to her head. She lives a full life! And she fits in just about anywhere, regardless of the company, which is why a crossover episode with “Magnum P.I.” from 1986 somehow actually works.

“The frustrating part for me was, here we have one of the world’s greatest actresses and we were using such a tiny portion of her range,” Sawyer told me. “Finally, toward the end, I wrote an episode that’s a callback to the pilot episode, when she had just become a published writer and the publisher, Preston Giles, is the murderer. So I wrote an episode called ‘The Return of Preston Giles’ and he gets shot at the end, and I wanted him to die in her arms. That’s the way I wrote the script.

Anglea Lansbury, left, and Carol Channing appear at a party at Sardis in New York on March 16, 1967. (John Duricka/AP)

“But the way they shot it, she’s standing there looking down at his body (laughs). I wanted to give her something more emotional to play, but she just didn’t want to do it. I never discussed it with her, she just chose to stay away from that and that wasn’t the style of the show, anyway.”

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That’s consistent throughout all 12 seasons. Jessica had no love interests or money problems or writer’s block. Every once in a while, though, Lansbury would depart from Jessica ever so briefly to play: Pretending to be a drunken barfly to get information, or playing the double role of her British cousin, a star of the London stage, and you think: The comedic range! She really is funny.

But for the most part, no matter the tragedy or shocking events transpiring around her, Jessica always keeps a stiff upper lip despite the murders that keep happening whenever she’s around.

That’s the old joke about the show: That Jessica is actually the one guilty of all those crimes. But bingeing episodes, I tend to focus on something else: How did she not fall into a deep depression surrounded by so much death, year after year?

Angela Lansbury is shown in this 1989 file photo celebrating the 100th episode of “Murder, She Wrote.” (DOUGLAS PIZAC/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

There’s something comforting if completely unrealistic about the fact that she doesn’t — that she simply looks around, squints a bit and logics out what happened.

That’s not even close to how things work in real life.

But in a world that feels increasingly chaotic, you can cue up an episode of “Murder, She Wrote” and there’s Jessica Fletcher, smartly dressed and ready to make sense of it all.

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Nina Metz is a Tribune critic

nmetz@chicagotribune.com

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