Angela Lansbury

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Angela Lansbury

from the trailer for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)
Born Angela Brigid Lansbury
October 16, 1925 (1925-10-16) (age 82)
London, England
Occupation Actress, Singer, Philanthropist, Presenter, Producer, Voice actress
Years active 1944-present
Spouse(s) Richard Cromwell (1945-46)
Peter Shaw (1949 – 2003)

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born October 16, 1925) is an English three-time Academy Award-nominated, Emmy-nominated, four-time Tony-winning and six-time Golden Globe-winning actress and singer best known for her work in film, such as her role as Mrs. Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate, her award-winning tenures on Broadway in such musicals as Mame, Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd, and her performance in the starring role of Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote. She holds the record for most Emmy nominations without winning an award, with eighteen nominations to her name.

Her multi-faceted career has spanned seven decades, and she is well known for her roles on both stage and screen.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Born in Regents Park in London, Lansbury was the daughter of Belfast-born actress Moyna MacGill and Edgar Lansbury, a prominent businessman, and the granddaughter of the former Labour Party leader George Lansbury. She is a cousin of the English animator and puppeteer Oliver Postgate, as George Lansbury is also his grandfather. Her earliest theatrical influences were teen-aged coloratura Deanna Durbin, screen star Irene Dunne, and her own mother, who encouraged her daughter's ambition by taking her to plays at the Old Vic and removing her from South Hampstead High School for Girls in order to enroll her in the Ritman School of Dancing and later the Webber-Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art (later the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art).

After her father's death of stomach cancer, her mother became involved with a Scotsman named Leckie Forbes, and the two merged their families under one roof in Hampstead. A former colonel with the British Army in India, Forbes proved to be a jealous and suspicious tyrant who ruled the household with an iron hand. Just prior to the German bombing campaign of London, Lansbury's mother was presented with the opportunity to take her children to America, and under cover of dark of night they fled from their unhappy home and sailed for Montreal, from there they headed to New York City. When her mother settled in Hollywood following a fund-raising Canadian tour of a Noel Coward play, she (and later her brothers) joined her there.

Lansbury worked at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles. At one of the frequent parties her mother hosted for British émigré performers in their Laurel Canyon home, she met would-be actor Michael Dyne, who arranged for her to meet Mel Ballerino, the casting director for the upcoming film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ballerino was casting Gaslight with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, as well, and he offered her the role of the impertinent and slightly malevolent maid Nancy. She was nominated for an Academy Award for her 1944 film debut, and the following year garnered another for her portrayal of Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray.

[edit] Career

[edit] Theatre

Angela Lansbury in Deuce, New York City 2007
Angela Lansbury in Deuce, New York City 2007

On Broadway, Lansbury received good reviews from her first musical outing, the short-lived 1964 Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle, which co-starred Lee Remick. Two years later, she was offered what proved to be the biggest triumph of her theatrical career, the title role in Mame, Jerry Herman's musical adaptation of the novel and subsequent film Auntie Mame, which had starred Rosalind Russell. Opening at the Winter Garden Theater on May 24, 1966, Mame ran for 1508 performances. Lansbury's portrayal, opposite Bea Arthur as Vera Charles, earned her the Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. She and Arthur became life-long friends. In addition, Lansbury's version of one of the play's songs, "We Need A Little Christmas", became the definitive version and has received substantial radio air-play around Christmas time every year since its release.

Lansbury won additional Tony Awards for Dear World (1969), the first Broadway revival of Gypsy (1974), and her English music hall turn as affection-starved meat pie entrepreneur Mrs. Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's ballad opera Sweeney Todd (1979). In a television interview with Robert Osborne on Turner Classic Movies aired in August 2006, Lansbury stated that, theatrically, she feels she would "most like to be remembered for this role." She also stated that this production was also a triumph and a comeback of sorts for Sondheim, whom she admires.

She also is a two-time winner of the Sarah Siddons Award (1975 and 1981) for dramatic achievement in Chicago theatre.

In 1971, Lansbury accepted the title role in the Jule Styne – Bob Merrill musical Prettybelle. After a difficult rehearsal period, the show opened to brutal reviews in Boston, where it closed within a week. In 1982 a recording of the show was released by Varese Sarabande which included most of the original cast and Lansbury's 11 o'clock number "When I'm Drunk, I'm Beautiful" along with "You Never Looked Better", a song that was cut early in the run.

Lansbury returned to the Broadway stage for the first time in more than 25 years in Deuce, a play by Terrence McNally, co-starring with Marian Seldes. The play previewed at the Music Box Theatre on April 11, 2007, and opened on May 6, 2007 in a limited run of 18 weeks. Lansbury received a Tony nomination in the category of Leading Actress in a Play for her role in this production, but did not win the Tony that year.

[edit] Film and television

at the 1989 Emmy Awards
at the 1989 Emmy Awards

Lansbury has enjoyed a long and varied career, mainly as a film actress in roles generally older than her actual age, appearing in everything from Samson and Delilah (1949) to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Her notable credits include The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in which she played Mrs. Iselin, the cold-blooded mother of a war veteran brainwashed into becoming a Communist assassin. She won much critical praise for her performance, and received her third Oscar nomination. (Lucille Ball had been considered for the role; a decade later, Ball coincidentally landed the title role in the film version of Mame, the role Lansbury had created on Broadway.) On CNN's Larry King Live, Lansbury said that her character in The Manchurian Candidate was her favorite of her many film roles.[1]

Lansbury's popularity from and association with Mame on Broadway in the '60s had her very much in demand everywhere in the media. Ever the humanitarian, she used her fame as an opportunity to benefit others wherever possible. For example, when appearing as a guest panelist on the popular Sunday night CBS-TV show, What's My Line?, she made an impassioned plea for viewers to contribute to the 1966 Muscular Dystrophy Association fundraising drive, chaired by Jerry Lewis.

After many years focused on the theatre, Lansbury returned to film, playing Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978). She was somewhat less successful as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).

Lansbury then turned to character voice work in animated films like The Last Unicorn (1982) and as the Dowager Empress in the animated film Anastasia in 1997. Her most famous voice work was the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit Beauty and the Beast (1991), who performed the Oscar-winning title song written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. She reprised the role in "Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas" (1997), and again in the Disney/Square-Enix video game Kingdom Hearts II in 2006. In the same year, she appeared in Nanny McPhee as great aunt Adelaide.

While Lansbury has won every Tony for which she's been nominated, with the exception of her nomination for Deuce in 2007, she was less successful with the Oscars and Emmys. The Oscar has always eluded her, and Lansbury holds the record for the most primetime Emmy nominations (twelve) as Best Actress without a single win. Yet, she is the recipient of several other prominent awards, including the People's Choice and Golden Globe.

Lansbury found her biggest success and a worldwide following as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984 - 1996), which was one of the longest running detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world.

She was also one of the alien voices in the Cadbury's Smash advertisements in the 1970s

In 1983 Lansbury starred opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in a BBC adaptation of the Broadway play A Talent for Murder. According to The Complete Films of Laurence Olivier (Author Jerry Vermilye, Publisher Citadel), Lansbury later stated that the production was "a rushed job", and her only reason for participating was the opportunity to work/team up with Sir Laurence Olivier.

In the early 1990s, Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was named a Disney Legend in 1995. She received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, Kennedy Center Honors in 2000, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

[edit] Personal life

In 1945, Lansbury married American actor Richard Cromwell when she was 19 and he was 35. Unbeknownst to her, Cromwell was bisexual, and the marriage dissolved after a year, but the two remained friends.

In 1949, Lansbury married British-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw, who had been a former boyfriend of Joan Crawford. Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Lansbury's career. Until his death in 2003, they enjoyed one of the longest show-business marriages on record.

Lansbury is the mother of two, stepmother of one, and a grandmother several times over. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Lansbury revealed a firestorm that destroyed the family's Malibu home in September 1970 was a blessing in disguise, as it prompted a move to rural County Cork in the Republic of Ireland, where her children were separated from the hard drugs with which they had been experimenting. Her son Anthony Shaw, after a brief fling with acting, became producer/director of Murder, She Wrote and presently is a television executive and director. Her only daughter Deirdre and son-in-law, a chef, are restaurateurs in West Los Angeles.

Lansbury was related to the late Sir Peter Ustinov by her half-sister Isolde's marriage to the British actor (they divorced in 1946). The two former in-laws appeared together professionally just once, in 1978's Death on the Nile. Lansbury is related by marriage to actress Ally Sheedy, wife of her nephew David Lansbury. Both her brothers, twins Edgar and Bruce, are successful theater producers (Edgar Lansbury was instrumental in bringing Godspell to Broadway, and Bruce Lansbury was also a television producer, notably for shows like Mission: Impossible).

Lansbury is a long-time resident of Brentwood, California, and supports various philanthropic groups in Southern California.

Lansbury had knee replacement surgery on July 14, 2005 [2].

In 2006, Lansbury purchased a condominium in New York City at a reported cost of $2 million. The following year she returned to Broadway once more in Deuce.

[edit] Filmography

[edit] Features

Dubbed the voice of Suzy Parker in the The Best of Everything (1959) although she was given no credit.[citation needed]

[edit] Upcoming

  • Broadway: Beyond the Golden Age (2008) (documentary)
  • The Boys (2008) (documentary)

[edit] Short Subjects

  • Some of the Best (1949)
  • Your Studio and You (1995)
  • Angela Landsbury's Positive Moves, A Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being at Any Age (Exercise and Lifestyle video, 1988)

[edit] Television credits

[edit] Theatre

[edit] West End

[edit] Broadway

[edit] Other

[edit] Awards and nominations

[edit] Academy Awards

Nominations

[edit] CableACE Awards

Wins

  • Actress in a Theatrical or Musical Program (Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982)(TV)(musical), 1983)

[edit] BAFTA Awards

Wins

  • Britannia Award (Lifetime Achievement, 2003)

Nominations

[edit] Drama Desk Awards

Wins

  • Outstanding Actress in a Musical, Sweeney Todd, (1979)
  • Outstanding Actress in a Musical, Gypsy, (1975)

Nominations

[edit] Emmy Awards

Nominations

  • Outstanding Guest Actress in a Drama Series (for playing Eleanor Duvall in "Law & Order: Trial by Jury", 2005)
  • Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Miniseries or Movie (The Blackwater Lightship, 2004)
  • Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series ("Murder, She Wrote", 1985-1996) (12 Consecutive Nominations)
  • Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 43rd Annual Tony Awards", 1990)
  • Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 41st Annual Tony Awards", 1987)
  • Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program (Sweeney Todd, 1985)
  • Outstanding Lead Actress in a Miniseries or Movie (Little Gloria... Happy at Last, 1983)

[edit] Golden Globes

Wins

Nominations

  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1995)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1993)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1991)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1989)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1988)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a TV-Series - Drama ("Murder, She Wrote", 1986)
  • Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Miniseries or TV-Movie (A Gift of Love: A Christmas Story, 1984)
  • Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy (Bedknobs and Broomsticks, 1972)
  • Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy (Something for Everyone, 1971)

[edit] Hasty Pudding Theatricals

Wins

[edit] National Board of Review

Wins

[edit] Screen Actors Guild Awards

Wins

Nominations

[edit] Television Critics Association Awards

Wins

  • Career Achievement Award (1996)

[edit] Tony Awards

Wins

  • Best Actress in a Musical, Sweeney Todd, (1979)
  • Best Actress in a Musical, Gypsy, (1975)
  • Best Actress in a Musical, Dear World, (1969)
  • Best Actress in a Musical, Mame, (1966)

Nominations

  • Best Actress in a Play, Deuce (2007)


Honorary Doctorates: University of Miami: Doctor of Humane Letters

Awards
Preceded by
Agnes Moorehead
for Mrs. Parkington		 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1946
for The Picture of Dorian Gray		 Succeeded by
Anne Baxter
for The Razor's Edge
Preceded by
Rita Moreno
for West Side Story		 Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture
1963
for The Manchurian Candidate		 Succeeded by
Margaret Rutherford
for The V.I.P.s
Preceded by
Liza Minnelli
in Flora the Red Menace		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1966
for Mame		 Succeeded by
Barbara Harris
in The Apple Tree
Preceded by
Lauren Bacall		 Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year
1968		 Succeeded by
Carol Burnett
Preceded by
Patricia Routledge in Darling of the Day
Leslie Uggamsin Hallelujah, Baby!		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1969
for Dear World		 Succeeded by
Lauren Bacall
in Applause
Preceded by
none		 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical
1974-1975
for Gypsy		 Succeeded by
Donna McKechnie
for A Chorus Line
Preceded by
Virginia Capers
in Raisin		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1975
for Gypsy		 Succeeded by
Donna McKechnie
in A Chorus Line
Preceded by
Nell Carter
in Ain't Misbehavin'		 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Musical
1978-1979
for Sweeney Todd		 Succeeded by
Patti LuPone
in Evita
Preceded by
Liza Minnelli
in The Act		 Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical
1979
for Sweeney Todd		 Succeeded by
Patti LuPone
in Evita
Preceded by
Jane Wyman
for Falcon Crest		 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama
1985
for Murder, She Wrote		 Succeeded by
Sharon Gless
for Cagney & Lacey
Preceded by
Sharon Gless
for Cagney & Lacey		 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama
1987
for Murder, She Wrote		 Succeeded by
Susan Dey
for L.A. Law
Preceded by
Jill Eikenberry
for L.A. Law		 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama
1990
for Murder, She Wrote		 Succeeded by
Sharon Gless
for The Trials of Rosie O'Neill
Preceded by
Patricia Wettig
for thirtysomething		 Golden Globe Award for Best Performance by an Actress In A Television Series - Drama
1992
for Murder, She Wrote		 Succeeded by
Regina Taylor
for I'll Fly Away
Preceded by
Robert Redford		 Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award
1996		 Succeeded by
Elizabeth Taylor

[edit] References

Balancing Act, the Authorized Biography of Angela Lansbury by Martin Gottfried, published by Little, Brown and Company, 1999

[edit] References

  1. ^ Interview with Angela Lansbury at Irish Film Institute 9 July 2006
  2. ^ Playbill News: Angela Lansbury to Have Knee Surgery

[edit] External links

Persondata
NAME Lansbury, Angela
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lansbury, Angela Brigid
SHORT DESCRIPTION English actress
DATE OF BIRTH October 16, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH London, England
DATE OF DEATH
PLACE OF DEATH