A tale old as time, our beloved Mrs. Potts will sing lullabies to us now from the stars.
Angela Lansbury (Dame Angela Lansbury, was born October 16, 1925, London, England and died October 11, 2022 in Los Angeles, California) She will be long remembered as a fabulous British-born American character actress who achieved success and acclaim for her stage, film, and television work.
Lansbury and her widowed mother, actress Moyna MacGill, emigrated from England to the United States in 1940. From 1940 to 1942 Lansbury studied acting at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio in New York City. Her film debut came in the psychological thriller “Gaslight” (1944), and her performance as a devious Cockney maid earned her an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. It was her film debut. She was 19 and working as a clerk at Bullock’s Department Store when she landed the roll. She next appeared as Elizabeth Taylor’s snobbish sister in “National Velvet” (1944), and she received another Oscar nomination the following year for her supporting performance in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (1945).
Lansbury played wicked or virtuous characters with equal aplomb and displayed her versatility in such films as “The Harvey Girls” (1946), “State of the Union” (1948), and “The Three Musketeers” (1948). She continued to conquer character roles during the 1950s, most notably in “A Lawless Street” (1955), “The Court Jester” (1956), and “The Long, Hot Summer” (1958). Her most acclaimed screen performance came as Laurence Harvey’s evil incestuous mother in director John Frankenheimer’s Cold-War thriller “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
For this film Lansbury received her third Oscar nomination. Her later movies included “Death on the Nile” (1978); “The Mirror Crack’d” (1980), in which she starred as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple and the wonderful “Mrs ‘arris Goes to Paris” (1992)
and “Mrs. Santa Claus” (1996).
Carrying on in the tradition of Ethel Merman and Mary Martin, Lansbury reigned supreme as queen of Broadway for several years and won three additional Tony Awards, for her roles in “Dear World” (1969), “Gypsy” (1975), and “Sweeney Todd” (1979). In 2009 she earned a fifth Tony Award, for her performance as an eccentric medium in Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit”.
Her many stage and feature film successes notwithstanding, Lansbury’s greatest popular triumph came when she was chosen for the leading role of mystery author Jessica Fletcher in the television series “Murder, She Wrote”,
which ran for 12 seasons, beginning in 1984. Also a renowned voice-over artist, Lansbury lent her vocal skills to such animated features as Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1991).
She will be missed.
“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 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” her family said in a statement.