Angela Lansbury Could Play Cozy or Criminal, Grand or Grand Guignol

Angela Lansbury in 1973. Photo: Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Every generation alive today has had its own Angela Lansbury. The TikTok generation found her most recently, toasting her for her longevity and thrilled by her ability to deliver a killer number with Bea Arthur at the Oscars. Millennials grew up to the sound of her voice guiding them through Beauty and the Beast; Generation X (watching TV with their folks) treasured her as the cozy, competent star of Murder, She Wrote; boomers adored her for her theater career, particularly her glitzy Broadway Mame; and their parents loved her for Golden Age classics like State of the Union. For several years before her death early on the morning of October 11, a few days shy of 97, she had been our longest-lived Academy Award nominee — she was nominated for her very first film role, the sly-eyed Cockney maid in 1944’s Gaslight — and she moved so easily between film, television, and stage that it was simple to imagine her always gliding through the culture, twinkling mischievously.

Born in 1925 to the politician Edgar Lansbury and the Irish actress Moyna MacGill “within the sound of Bow bells,” Lansbury was an East London girl. Her grandfather was George Lansbury, the pacifist, socialist, pro-suffrage Labour politician, described as “the most lovable figure in modern politics” for his fierce integrity. Angela grew up quickly: Her father died when she was 9, and her mother — guided by a dream — called Angela his “deputy,” relying on her early. In 1939 when other children were evacuated from London in advance of the Nazi bombings, Angela stayed to be near her mother, leaving regular schooling (for good, it turned out) and taking dancing and acting classes. The following year, Angela, her two brothers, and her mother fled England for New York. They made it, but the ship they crossed in was later sunk by U-boats — the family seemed to escape the war by a hair’s breadth.

In New York, Angela followed her mother into entertainment, enrolling in the Feagin School of Dramatic Art and frequenting the Stage Door Canteen. At 16, she left her acting conservatory and developed a nightclub act that exploited her sweet singing voice and gift for impressions, playing a club in Montreal by lying about her age. When her mother went to Los Angeles to look for film work, Angela went too, supporting the family by working at a department store and wrapping gifts. When she was 17, she was cast in both Gaslight and The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which she played the doomed cabaret singer Sibyl Vane. Her experience of pretending to be older came in handy. She was nominated in successive years for Academy Awards for these two films, a rocket launch for a career that then orbited quietly for almost a decade and a half, some of that under contract at MGM.

Her particular beauty — huge eyes, a round face, a knowing chin — baffled producers, so she had what one of her biographers, Martin Gottfried, calls “history’s longest and earliest middle age.” Her directors cast her as a mature woman from the very beginning: In The Harvey Girls, a 20-year-old Lansbury played a 40-year-old saloon madam; in State of the Union, Frank Capra aged her up several decades to play a 47-year-old Spencer Tracy’s ruthless girlfriend and political manipulator. She was 36 when she played Elvis’s mother in Blue Hawaii (he was nine years younger), and she was only three years older than her “son,” Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate, the part that earned her a third Supporting Actress Oscar nomination. Older sisters, mothers, icy mistresses — she never had the starring role in her entire movie career, something she noted with tart emphasis when she was awarded an Honorary Oscar in 2013. “Movies have taken a bit of a back seat except for darling Mrs. Potts,” she said, referring to her voice performance in Beauty and the Beast. It took until she was 41 for someone to finally give her a lead role, and the theater was what gave it to her: Hotel Paradiso, a forgettable comedy she played with Bert Lahr.

And theater certainly celebrated her where film did not — Lansbury won five Tony Awards and was nominated for two more. (She returned the favor, later saying, “The theater always came first. Movies were incidental.”) In New York and London, she originated roles in two Stephen Sondheim musicals — Cora Hoover Hooper in Anyone Can Whistle and Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd — and played in several others. One of her Tonys was for Mama Rose in a revived Gypsy; another nomination, in 2010, was for a revival of A Little Night Music. The most important role of her life, though, came in 1966, and it was with another composer: Jerry Herman fought for her to play the lead in Mame, his Broadway musicalization of the play Auntie Mame, in which a glamorous eccentric teaches everyone around her how to embrace life. It was Lansbury’s dream role, and it made her an icon. She was on the cover of Life in backless gold pajamas! “I stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples’ mothers. I had only a few more years to kick up my heels,” said Lansbury. She chopped her hair into a sleek crop and slid down a balustrade into history: “Your special fascination’ll / Prove to be inspirational / We think you’re just sensational / Mame!”

Her theatrical gift was a mix of a farceur’s timing, immense warmth (which she could curdle on demand), and a willingness to go broad, tapping into old reservoirs of English music-hall brass. But she pushed hard for composers and writers to admit her to their creative process. In a joint interview, Jesse Green spoke with Lansbury and Sondheim about the adjustments she had persuaded him to make for the jolly, homicidal Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd. According to Sondheim, her instincts were often right. “When an actor says, ‘I created the character,’ I used to think, No, you didn’t; the authors did,” he said. “But I came to understand what it means from their point of view. Angie would question a line or an emotion or an attitude and say, ‘This seems inconsistent.’ And if I agreed with her, I changed it. I mean, that’s what you do with actors, right? Sixty percent of the best plays in history have been written by actors. There’s a reason for that.”

When Lansbury’s options in the theater started to thin, her brother Bruce — then the head of programming at Paramount Pictures Television — recommended that she think about a series. The one she took was Murder, She Wrote. It’s difficult to imagine now the scale of its success. Few shows before or since have been quite like it: a country-unifying network juggernaut, watched at its peak by nearly 40 million viewers (Game of Thrones maxed out at around 10 million) and never out of the Nielsen Top 20 in its entire 12-year run. Lansbury was its key. No fewer than twelve of her 18 Emmy nominations were for the role of Jessica Fletcher, though she never won. To play her, Lansbury put away her high-kicking music-hall theatricality and converted herself into pure relatability. (In 1994, she scored a perfect 100 on the People magazine “lovability index,” which sounds both bogus and true.) As the unflappable amateur crime solver from Cabot Cove, Maine, Lansbury played a woman in her 60s, vibrant and amused and capable, without children or a romantic partner or — most important — regrets or self-doubt. It’s the kind of role that, for all its gentleness, feels ahead of our time. The show is still beloved, a comforting haven of ontological order and self-confidence. When the stage actor George Hearn guest-starred and asked Lansbury for advice on how to play on a television soundstage, she told him, “Think of it as a cold room, and the camera is the fireplace — with a fire going.” That was her (and Jessica’s) secret: the ability to treat the camera, and therefore the TV audience, like a welcome, radiant source of warmth.

In the show’s final five years, Lansbury took over as executive producer. Her husband, Peter Shaw, and stepson, David, were producers; another son, Anthony, was a director. (Lansbury kept her family tightly around her after some early brushes with disaster in the 1960s. When her children were teens, they began using drugs — her daughter, Deirdre, even fell in with members of the Manson Family, who were living in Malibu near the Shaw-Lansbury household. At one point, to rescue her children, Lansbury moved the family briefly to Ireland.) Her affection for her time in Cabot Cove waxed and waned in the years since Murder, She Wrote’s 1996 cancellation. Sometimes, she talked about reviving the role; at other times, she seemed wearied by the grind of its 264 episodes. In a 2007 interview with the New York Times, she sounded over it. “I felt terribly trapped in it for years,” she said, “but couldn’t get out because so many people were depending on me.”

Shaw died in 2003, and in Lansbury’s Honorary Oscar acceptance speech four years later, she credited Emma Thompson with rescuing her from heartbreak by casting her in 2005’s Nanny McPhee. Clearly, she saw work as a refuge. She kept acting for the next decade and a half, well into her 90s, gathering another few Tony Awards and going on the road with an Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy with James Earl Jones in 2013 and an American tour of Blithe Spirit when she was 89. Her indomitability became part of her legend. When she developed a hairline fracture in her hip days before opening in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man, she went on with a cane. She finally began to slow down in the last part of the decade, though she played Lady Bracknell in a one-night-only benefit reading of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest in 2019. Awards continued to pour in, though — already a Commander of the British Empire, she was named a Dame; she received an Olivier Award for Blithe Spirit and the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre. These celebrations mattered to her, as did the recognition of other artists. At yet another ceremony (this one a 2019 luncheon for Golden Globes nominees), she told the younger actors to focus on their shared community of artists, as she said she had done since she was a little girl in London. “As you leave here today and are invited to endure a seemingly endless parade of programs that label you a ‘winner’ or a ‘loser’ — I’ve been there, I’ve done that,” she said, nodding to her many nominations and many losses. But she advised them to “remember this room … when we are all together as one.”