Dame Angela Lansbury Has Died At 96
I’ve already been cursing out 2022 for taking so many legends from us, and now we’ve lost another massive, massive legend. We’re now living in a world without the legendary Dame Angela Lansbury in it. Angela Lansbury’s family sadly announced that she died in her sleep early this morning at her home in L.A. She was a few days away from turning 97. This is not the news I wanted to read today, or ever.
“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. 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. 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.”
Every generation is feeling Dame Angela’s loss today because her career has stretched over 75 years, and she has brought us many iconic characters, from Mame to Jessica Fletcher to Mrs. Potts. If you’re a kid from the 80s, you can probably say, “Jessica Fletcher helped raise me!” And if you’re a kid from the early-90s, you can probably say, “Mrs. Potts helped raise me!” So this one really hurts.
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925. Her Irish-born mother, Moyna Macgill, was an actress and her father George Lansbury was an English timber merchant and politician. Angela got her first taste of the theater early on. Angela’s mother took her to see plays at the Old Vic in London and enrolled her in a school for the arts and dance. During World War II, Angela’s family left England for the United States. Angela studied acting in NYC before her family moved to Los Angeles. In L.A., Moyna helped Angela land a seven-year contract with MGM. At 17 years old, Angela landed her first movie role, and it was a big one. Angela made her screen debut in Gaslight (1944), playing Nancy Oliver. She was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her first movie performance. Back then, Variety wrote that Angela went from unknown to movie star in just four days.
After Gaslight turned a young Angela into a Hollywood star, she played Elizabeth Taylor’s sister in National Velvet (1944) and got her second Oscar nomination for her performance in The Picture of Dorian Grey (1945). Around that time, Angela married her first husband, actor Richard Cromwell, but the marriage was a mess and didn’t even last a year. Richard turned out to be gay and Angela didn’t find out until after they split. But they stayed friends until his death in 1960.
In 1949, Angela married the love of her life, Peter Shaw, who was an actor at the time and later became a Hollywood agent. Peter died in 2003.
During the 1940s, Angela made several more movies for MGM, including The Harvey Girls and The Three Musketeers. Angela left MGM after her contract was up because she wasn’t happy with the roles they offered her. Angela continued to work in radio, on stage, and in film in the 1950s. In 1952, she gave birth to her and Peter’s first child, Anthony Pullen Shaw. Their second child, Deirdre Angela Shaw, was born a year later.
Angela’s career was down in the 1950s, and she found that she was only being offered older women roles even though she was in her 30s. Case in point: Angela Lansbury played Elvis’ mom in 1961’s Blue Hawaii, and she was barely ten years older than him. Angela was also only three years older than Laurence Harvey when she played his mother in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate but that performance got her a third Oscar nomination. Angela never won the three Oscars she was nominated for, but she became an Honorary Oscar winner in 2013.
I need to stop here to slap myself for a minute because I have yet to really mention Dame Angela’s theater career, which was as impressive as her movie and TV careers. On Broadway, Angela was in the play A Taste of Honey (1960) and the original production of Stephen Sondheim’s Anyone Can Whistle (1964) before she starred as the title role in Mame (1966), opposite Bea Arthur as Vera Charles. Growing up, one of my little friends’ mom had the original cast recording for Mame and played it for us all the time. I’m pretty sure listening to the Mame cast recording helped make me gay. And I’m forever grateful to Angela for that. Both Angela and Bea won Tonys for their performances. Here they are joining legendary forces to perform Bosom Buddies from Mame at the 1988 Tonys:
Angela went on to play Auntie Mame again in the 1983 Broadway revival. She also starred on Broadway as Rose in Gypsy (1973), as Anna in The King and I (1978), as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (2009), and as Madame Armfeldt in A Little Night Music (2009). Overall, she was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won five. One of those wins was for another iconic role: Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). And to me, nobody has ever done Mrs. Lovett better than Dame Angela.
In the 1970s, Angela starred in the movies Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and Death on the Nile (1978). And in the early-80s is when Angela was offered two big television roles: one was in a Norman Lear sitcom, and the other was THEE Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. We know the choice Angela made. She played Jessica Fletcher for twelve years and was nominated for an Emmy twelve times for the role but never won. That feels illegal. I mean, Angela deserved twelve Emmys alone for playing Jessica AND her glamorous cousin Emma simultaneously!
After Murder, She Wrote’s run ended, she delivered another iconic performance when she did the voice of Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. And Angela never slowed down after that. She was in episodes of Law & Order, the 2017 mini-series version of Little Women, an Australian theater tour of Driving Miss Daisy, and 2018’s Mary Poppins Returns. Her last performance is in the upcoming Glass Onions: A Knives Out Mystery.
Angela is survived by her children, Anthony, Deirdre, and David (who is Peter Shaw’s son from a previous relationship), her three grandchildren, and five great-grandchildren.
Rest in peace, Dame Angela Lansbury.
Pic: PA Images via Getty Images