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Angela Lansbury’s pluck was apparent from her first role, that of the flirtatious maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).
“On the first day of shooting, even though she was only 17 and had no experience, she was immediately professional,” said the director, as quoted in On Cukor. “She became this little housemaid — even her face seemed to change. Suddenly, I was watching real movie acting.”
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The part won Lansbury, who died on Tuesday at 96 at her home in Los Angeles, her first Oscar nomination.
Her career spanned eight decades and every medium, including the stage. She won four Tony Awards for best actress in a musical, for her roles in Sweeney Todd, Mame, Dear World and Gypsy, in the ‘60s and ‘70s; and one for best featured actress in a play, for Blithe Spirit, in 2009. Lansbury also sang the Oscar-winning song “Beauty and the Beast.”
But the British-born actress found her most enduring work in television, primarily as the intrepid detective-novelist Jessica Fletcher on Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons, starting in 1984. She was 59 when the series began, a coup considering that network executives typically courted a younger audience. It was the closest she ever came to playing herself, she said.
“I didn’t want her to be a character — I wanted her to be every woman,” Lansbury explained in 2018. “I think that’s what gave her the longevity. Every woman could connect with her, and every man could. She was a strong, real woman, and men like that in women.”
Lansbury was nominated 12 times for an Emmy, as outstanding lead actress in a drama series. But despite the popularity of Murder, She Wrote (over 30 million viewers watched it every week), she never took home the statue. She held another industry record, the dubious one of receiving the most Emmy nominations — 18 — without a win.
Born into an upper-middle-class family in London, Lansbury credited both her father’s English heritage and her mother’s Irish one for her natural talent: “I’m eternally grateful for the Irish side of me. That’s where I got my sense of comedy and whimsy. As for the English half, that’s my reserved side. But put me onstage, and the Irish comes out. The combination makes a good mix for acting.”