Angela Lansbury Death: How Playing America’s Miss Marple Turned Her Into The Richest Woman In TV History

Angela Lansbury Death: The image everyone will retain of Angela Lansbury is of a sweet and stylish little biddy, kindly and highly intelligent, with clear, beady-blue eyes and a voice burbling away like a stream of sparkling water.

I know I will cherish her performance as the singing teapot in Beauty And The Beast because the Disney animators did such a brilliant job of capturing all of these qualities.

It was a wholesome image that was encouraged by Angela herself, saying: ‘I try to be organized. I make lists. I hate things to be out of order.’

Angela Lansbury Death: How Playing America’s Miss Marple Turned Her Into The Richest Woman In TV History

As in life, so in death.

The actress — who was at one point the richest woman in television history thanks to her role as amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher in 264 episodes of Murder, She Wrote — died peacefully in her sleep yesterday at her Los Angeles home at the grand old age of 96.

Jessica Fletcher was essentially America’s Miss Marple, a twinkly-eyed lady of a certain age living alone in Cabot Cove, which is a version of St Mary Mead. As with Agatha Christie, whose world embodies a timeless lost Englishness, Murder, She Wrote, conveyed, as Angela said, ‘heartland American values’, and the public adored it, with 28 million tuning in each week from 1984 until 1996.

It’s always being repeated, everywhere in the world.

It was a hard slog, with 14-hour days for 12 full years. Angela’s remuneration went up from $40,000 an episode to $200,000, by which time she’d become the executive producer and negotiated all manner of lucrative concessions from Universal and CBS.

Murder, She Wrote was popular with advertisers — which made it popular with the TV networks, if not with whoever decides on the winners of the Emmys. Angela was nominated 18 times and didn’t win once.

She was once asked why she kept working long after other actors might have settled for retirement. ‘I’ve never been particularly aware of my age,’ she said. ‘It’s like being on a bicycle — I just put my foot down and keep going.’

Jessica Fletcher was the first role Angela had played which made her a public figure, recognized in the street, and asked for autographs. British-born, she was made a CBE in 1994 and upgraded to Dame Angela in 2014.

She was not always seen as a little old lady, however. Angela was the actress the director Milos Forman really wanted for the role of the hatchet-faced Nurse Ratched in his 1975 production of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — and her husband, Peter Shaw, was strongly in favor. But after studying the script, Angela reverted to type: ‘This is a wonderful role, but I simply cannot play it. She is so awful, so evil.’

She didn’t want to dent her cozy appeal — she only wanted audiences to love her. Hence, Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit in the West End with Rupert Everett, in 2014, or Driving Miss Daisy in an Australian tour with James Earl Jones. Angela was Mrs Santa Claus, Aunt March in Little Women, and Aunt Adelaide in Nanny McPhee.

Yet Milos Forman, and her husband for that matter, could see there was something about Angela, her drive, her perfectionism, which had the potential to be sinister and bristling — a coldness lurking on the other side of her pervasive niceness.

In other words, the side of her George Cukor appreciated, and brought out memorably in Gaslight, all those years ago, and which, The Manchurian Candidate apart, she was never to go near ever again.

Angela Lansbury’s career began at MGM in 1943, in the era of Katharine Hepburn, Joan Crawford and Judy Garland. She went on to become a star in Broadway musicals — Sondheim was to write Sweeney Todd for her.

It helped that she came from a well-connected family. Angela’s grandfather was George Lansbury, who represented Poplar in the House of Commons and was the leader of the Labour Party in the 1930s. He toured America with Eleanor Roosevelt, the wife of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, giving speeches on world disarmament. His pacifist beliefs were not even dented by the rise of Hitler.

Angela’s father ran a business providing wood veneers for ocean liners. Her mother, Moyna, was an actress, who’d played Desdemona opposite Basil Rathbone in Othello.

Angela was born in 1925, and they all lived in Hamilton Terrace, off London’s Regent’s Park, with two scullery maids, a parlor maid and a cook. The wood veneer trade must have been precarious, however, as when Angela’s father died, when she was nine, she recalls that ‘we really had no income to speak of.’

Moyna became the mistress of a mad Scotsman called Leckie Forbes, who wore a World War I tin hat and kept a loaded revolver under the pillow. Nevertheless, Leckie paid for Angela’s education, at the South Hampstead School for Girls and the Webber-Douglas drama college.

Here Angela played Rosalind to Avengers star Patrick Macnee’s Orlando. Meanwhile, her sister, Isolde, got married to Peter Ustinov— and at the reception Moyna met somebody who persuaded her to escape the mad Scotsman, and the impending war, by going to America.

Moyna and Angela were evacuated on the last civilian vessel to cross the Atlantic and once on the other side of the pond, they were looked after by more of Moyna’s friends, who gave them a place to live in New York and helped Angela enroll at a place offering dance classes and singing lessons.

But even at the age of 15, Angela reckoned: ‘You don’t learn how to act. You either got it or you ain’t.’

When her mother was offered small acting jobs in touring shows, Angela followed her out West. She earned $28 a week as a gift wrapper in Los Angeles department stores, which just about kept the wolf from the door.

She auditioned for various directors at the studios — and George Cukor was looking for a saucy and precocious maid for Gaslight, the psychological thriller which was to star Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman.

Angela was good at accents — the film required a Cockney — and won the role. MGM paid her $500 a week, with annual options for six years. She was brilliant as the insinuating skivvy, perhaps never better.

‘You know, don’t you, that gentlemen friends are inclined to take liberties,’ says Boyer. ‘Oh no sir,’ replies Angela, ‘not with me. I can take care of myself — when I want to.’

It is an extraordinarily sly and slightly dangerous performance, for which Angela was nominated for the 1944 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress.

She next played Dorian Gray’s music-hall girlfriend, and victim, Sybil Vane, in the film version of Oscar Wilde’s masterpiece The Picture Of Dorian Gray, and was nominated for the Academy Award again. Her salary increased to $1,500 a week.

But though Angela was in National Velvet with Elizabeth Taylor, Hollywood never quite knew what to do with her. She made no progress towards bigger parts — a villainous queen in Gene Kelly’s Three Musketeers, a silly princess in Danny Kaye’s The Court Jester — and before long was typecast as ‘baggy-faced frumps,’ such as Orson Welles’s girlfriend in The Long Hot Summer, even though Angela was half his age.

And this seemed to be the pattern — Angela was cast as characters much older than she really was. In Blue Hawaii, she’s Elvis’ mother, and Elvis was 29 and she was 36. In The Manchurian Candidate — which earned her another Oscar nod — Laurence Harvey, playing Angela’s brainwashed son, was in actuality only three years her junior.

Matters came to a head when, in 1962, she was cast as Warren Beatty’s mother in All Fall Down and she decided she’d had enough of being patronized. Describing Beatty as ‘egotistical, self-centered and looking out for himself,’ she told him to his face: ‘You conceited a*****e! You are a horrible brat!’

As Angela said, she’d been getting ‘good small parts, but always small’, and because of this, ‘I didn’t get a lot of offers.’ At one point she even had to queue up for unemployment benefits.

She drifted back to New York, got second billing to a neurotic Lee Remick in a play, and was in musicals that quickly closed — in one cursed production, an actor had a heart attack and died on stage and a dancer fell into the orchestra pit on top of the saxophonist, who also had a heart attack.

Angela was rescued by being cast in the hit musical Mame, which opened in 1966 when she was 41. A big campy exercise, with Angela having 28 costume changes, it ran for 1,508 performances — and Angela was devastated when Lucille Ball was chosen to star in the film version.

Angela went back to California, only to witness her house burning down in a bush fire. She had what can only be described as a nervous breakdown, and disappeared to Ireland. ‘I wanted to start life over again in an uncluttered way and live a simple life,’ she said.

Angela found a Georgian property on 20 acres in County Cork, and it’s here she raised her children — wanting to isolate them from the American drug culture.

Angela had married Peter Shaw, an agent with William Morris, in 1949. They were together until his death in 2003. There’d been an earlier marriage to one Richard Cromwell in 1945, which ended after a year. One night he ‘simply disappeared’, and Angela found out he was gay.

They were swiftly divorced on grounds of ‘incompatibility’.

From Ireland, Angela came to Britain occasionally — she was Gertrude to Albert Finney’s Hamlet when the National Theatre opened. She was the seemingly dotty Miss Froy (who is actually a secret agent) in a remake of The Lady Vanishes.

I remember her in Bedknobs And Broomsticks and as the comically drunk Salome Otterbourne in Death On The Nile, where her brother-in-law Ustinov is Poirot.

And she even played Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d, with Elizabeth Taylor and Rock Hudson.

Jessica Fletcher would have been delighted.

How Angela Lansbury saved her teen daughter from the clutches of Charles Manson by uprooting her family from the US and moving to Ireland

The late Angela Lansbury

who died in the early hours of Tuesday at her Los Angeles home just days shy of her 97th birthday — once had to pry her daughter from the clutches of convicted murderer Charles Manson.

In a 2014 interview with DailyMail.com, Lansbury revealed that Diedre, now 69, had begun running with a crowd led by the cult leader during the 1960s, and with her brother Anthony had become involved with drugs.

In order to keep her daughter and the rest of her family safe, the ‘Murder, She Wrote’ actress moved her whole family from their home in Los Angeles to Ireland, where her mother’s family hailed from.

Lansbury said the troubles with Diedre and her older son Anthony, now 70, began in the 1960s when they fell under the sway of drugs.

‘It started with cannabis but moved on to heroin,’ the Sweeney Todd star explained.

Their drug use brought her children, who were just teens at the time, into unsavory circles.

‘There were factions up in the hills above Malibu that were dedicated to deadly pursuits,’ she continued. ‘It pains me to say it but, at one stage, Deidre was in with a crowd led by Charles Manson.’

Like some of Manson’s followers, who would later commit the horrendous Tate–LaBianca murders, Diedre was allegedly drawn to the cult leaders charms.

‘She was one of many youngsters who knew him — and they were fascinated,’ Lansbury continued. ‘He was an extraordinary character, charismatic in many ways, no question about it.’

Fearing the kind of trouble her daughter might get into if she stayed in Manson’s circle, Lansbury proposed a major move overseas.

”I said to [husband] Peter [Shaw], “We have to leave.” So we upped sticks and moved the family to a house I found in County Cork,’ she said, explaining that it was a sort of homecoming, even though she had been born in London.

‘I was drawn to Ireland because it was the birthplace of my mother and it was also somewhere my children wouldn’t be exposed to any more bad influences,’ Lansbury continued. ‘I still have a house there which I try and visit at least once a year.

‘So I refused all work for a year and simply kept house. I bought Elizabeth David’s books and learnt how to cook properly,’ she added, referencing the popular British cooking writer. ‘It was a wonderful time in my life.’

A change of scenery proved to be just the prescription for her children, who thrived in Ireland.

‘Anthony pulled right out of his bad habits quite quickly,’ Lansbury shared. ‘It took Deidre a little longer, but she finally got married and she and her husband now live in Los Angeles, where they run their own Italian restaurant.’

Anthony would later follow his mother’s footsteps in the entertainment industry, and the two even collaborated when he directed 68 episodes of her series Murder, She Wrote.

Even though everything worked out with her family, the thought of what could have happened to her children still frightened Lansbury decades later.

‘It fills me with dread. Peter and I had no idea what had been going on,’ she admitted. ‘But then we had no experience of drugs. We didn’t know the significance of finding a pipe in a drawer. Why would we? And when we did, we didn’t know how to help them. Nor were there any experts back then who could offer advice to the parents of kids from good families who were using, and sometimes overdosing on, drugs. It was like an epidemic.’

‘Certainly, I have no doubt we would have lost one or both of our two if they hadn’t been removed to a completely different milieu, the simplicity of life in Ireland,’ she added.

‘In the end we found a doctor who prescribed methadone, a heroin substitute, which helped with the withdrawal symptoms as Anthony and Deidre were weaned off hard drugs. We were so very, very lucky we spotted what was happening just in time.’

Manson was eventually convicted 1971 of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for seven murders committed by his followers in 1969.

Although he is not believed to have explicitly ordered the killings, his behavior and teachings convinced a jury that he was responsible for the murders. The prosecution said that Manson’s ideology constituted an overt act of conspiracy.

On the night of August 8–9, Manson’s followers murdered the pregnant actress Sharon Tate (who was the wife of director Roman Polanski), along with her friend Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger of the Folger family, the Polish writer and director Wojciech Frykowski and Steven Parent. On August 10, Manson’s followers broke into the home of Leno LaBianca and his wife Rosemary and brutally murdered the two.

On that fateful summer night, Polanski was in London scouting locations for the Day of the Dolphin when he got the call that his wife was stabbed to death 16 times in one of the most vicious and brutal murders in the history of Los Angeles.

Media frenzy directly followed the murders, with speculation that perhaps it had been part of a satanic ritual.

Polanski posed for photographs in the home, next to where the word ‘PIG’ was written in blood, saying he hoped the graphic images would help shock people into coming forward with information.

About a month later members of the Manson ‘Family’ were arrested on suspicion of involvement in an unrelated murder, which lead investigators to a breakthrough on the Tate case as well.

The suspects told police they had killed Tate and her friends not because of who they were, but because of the home they were in, which had belonged to a previous acquaintance of Manson.

Manson died of natural causes on November 19, 2017 at Corcoran State Prison, CA where he spent 47 years on death row. He was 83.

Diedre’s connection to Manson doesn’t appear to have been close enough for him to involve her in the cult’s 1969 murders, as Lansbury told RadioTimes in 2017 that the family moved after their house burned down in 1970.

She said both Anthony and Diedre had to learn to cook and garden to stay self-sufficient in their new Irish home.

In Jeff Guinn’s 2014 book Manson: The Life And Times Of Charles Manson, he noted that Diedre never moved in full-time with Manson’s cult, but she was still useful to him, as he and other Manson family members would ‘go stock up on clothes or car parts without a concern for cost, because Didi paid for everything with her mother’s credit cards.’

However, they were eventually canceled, and she reportedly withdrew from Manson’s circle.

Kristin Chenoweth, Kathy Griffin and Josh Gad join chorus of stars paying tribute to actress Angela Lansbury… hours after her passing at age 96

By Deirdre Simonds and Eve Buckland For Dailymail.Com

Kristin Chenoweth, Kathy Griffin and Josh Gad have joined the chorus of celebrities paying tribute to the late actress Angela Lansbury, who passed away on Tuesday.

While mourning the loss of one of the entertainment industry’s most prolific stars,  Chenoweth, 54, penned a heartfelt tweet thanking Lansbury for her ‘art & wisdom.’

‘Nobody did Mame quite like her. Rest in peace, Angela Lansbury,’ the Broadway star, who is best known as the originator of Glinda in the hit musical Wicked.

Meanwhile, Griffin, tweeted: ‘I cannot tell you how many ladies and gays are crushed, moved and feeling nostalgic about something in the past with the news of the passing of the fabulous Dame Angela Lansbury.’

The tributes come just hours after Lansbury passed away at the age of 96, just five days before her 97th birthday.

Gad marveled at Lansbury’s impact on the world and how ‘rare’ it is that ‘one person can touch multiple generations’ with a ‘breadth of work that defines decade after decade.’

‘#AngelaLansbury was that artist. From “Mame” to “Bedknobs” to “Murder She Wrote” to “B&TB” to “Mary Poppins Returns” she touched 4 generations. RIP Legend,’ he tweeted.

Sean Hayes shared a photo of the performer smiling as he reacted to losing ‘another amazing woman and talent.’

‘Your talent and career were an inspiration to the world. Rest in peace, dearest Angela. ❤️

Modern Family’s Jesse Tyler Ferguson recalled ‘sitting next to Angela Lansbury at an opening night.’

‘Even though I had to pee I refused to leave my seat during intermission. I spent the 15 minutes chatting with her instead. She was incredibly lovely and I’m so glad I had that brief time with her. RIP Angela,’ he tweeted.

Uzo Aduba tweeted a photo with the actress back in 2012 and gushed about being a ‘VERY excited #theaterkid’ upon their meeting after one of her Godspell performances.

‘She poured so much love into each of us. An icon of the stage, and legend across so many mediums but, we all knew…she was always one of us :). Thank you, Angela Lansbury. Thank you,’ the Orange Is the New Black star recalled.

Mia Farrow tweeted: ‘Gratitude for the magnificent Angela Lansbury who gave us so many great performances. It was an honor to have worked with her and to know her as a friend. Thank you dearest Angie. Love forever.’

The Irish-British and American actress, famed for her roles in Murder, She Wrote and Beauty and the Beast died peacefully at her home in Los Angeles, her three children revealed.

A statement from her family read: ‘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.’

Lansbury became a legend in Hollywood and on Broadway during a career that spanned an impressive eight decades and saw her taking on roles alongside some of the industry’s best-known stars when she was just a teen – with the actress landing her first major movie job just four years after she fled wartime London at the age of 14.

Having moved to New York with her actress mother after leaving their home in the UK, Lansbury dedicated herself to her love of drama, and she burst onto the film scene in spectacular fashion at the age of 18, when she landed her first role in the 1944 thriller Gaslight, which saw her holding her own on the big screen alongside Hollywood heavyweights like Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer.

The job would ultimately earn her the first of three Oscar nominations for Best Supporting Actress – the second of which came one year later for her role in The Portrait of Dorian Gray – and marked the beginning of an illustrious career on the stage and screen, during which she would star alongside a number of industry icons, including Gene Kelly and Katharine Hepburn.

However, to many TV lovers, Lansbury, who is survived by her three children and three grandchildren, was best known for her portrayal of mystery writer and amateur detective, Jessica Fletcher in the hit American crime drama series, Murder She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons from 1984 until 1996.

For her role on the program, Lansbury was nominated for ten Golden Globes, winning four, earning her the record for the most Golden Globe nominations and wins for Best Actress in a television drama series.

She was also recognized for her work on the hit show with 12 Emmy Award nominations – once again making history for achieving the most Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series, despite never winning the award.

The series itself received three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as six Golden Globe nominations in the same category, with two major wins.

In addition to her work on the hit CBS series, Lansbury also earned global fame through a wide variety of other roles on the stage and the screen.

Even her voice earned her recognition the world over, after she lent it to the iconic Beauty and the Beast character Mrs. Potts in Disney’s 1991 animated movie Beauty and the Beast.

In 2013, she received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of her 80 year acting career, having been nominated for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress on three separate occasions for her roles in Gaslight (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

Beyond the big and small screens, Lansbury became a legend on the stage, having trod the boards of Broadway in a number of different productions, with her work on the Great White Way earning her five Tony Awards, as well as a lifetime achievement award.

Having earned Oscar nods for two of her first three roles on the big screen, it seemed to many that Lansbury was destined to become one of Hollywood’s greatest leading ladies – however she later revealed that her mature demeanor prompted producers to pigeonhole her as older characters.

In 1948, when she was just 23, her hair was streaked with gray so she could play a fortyish newspaper publisher with a yen for Spencer Tracy in State of the Union.

Speaking to the New York Times in 2009, Lansbury noted that she ‘wasn’t very good at being a starlet’ and ‘wasn’t cut out’ for the bright glare of the spotlight that came with life as one of Hollywood’s glamorous leading ladies.

‘I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,’ she confessed. ‘I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing. It was very difficult. I tried to fit in, but I really wasn’t cut out for it.’

The actress also noted that she wasn’t skilled at playing the industry game, joking at the time that she ‘maybe’ should have ‘slept with’ more people or even ‘played’ MGM producer and co-founder Louis B. Mayer in order to get ahead.

‘I don’t know what I did wrong,’ she continued. ‘Maybe I didn’t sleep with enough people. I think that had something to do with it. I really do. Maybe I didn’t play Louis B. Mayer the way I might have.’

Her stardom came in middle age when she became the hit of the New York theater, winning Tony Awards for Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), Gypsy (1975) and Sweeney Todd (1979).

She was back on Broadway and got another Tony nomination in 2007 in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, playing a scrappy, brash former tennis star, reflecting with another ex-star as she watches a modern-day match from the stands.

In 2009 she collected her fifth Tony, for best featured actress in a revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit and in 2015 won an Olivier Award in the role.

But Lansbury’s widest fame began in 1984 when she launched Murder, She Wrote on CBS.

Based loosely on Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple stories, the series centered on Jessica Fletcher, a middle-aged widow and former substitute school teacher living in the seaside village of Cabot Cove, Maine.

She had achieved notice as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth.

The actress found the first series season exhausting.

‘I was shocked when I learned that had to work 12-15 hours a day, relentlessly, day in, day out,’ she recalled. ‘I had to lay down the law at one point and say ‘Look, I can’t do these shows in seven days; it will have to be eight days.'”

CBS and the production company, Universal Studio, agreed, especially since Murder, She Wrote had become a Sunday night hit. Despite the long days – she left her home at Brentwood in West Los Angeles at 6 a.m. and returned after dark – and reams of dialogue to memorize, Lansbury maintained a steady pace. She was pleased that Jessica Fletcher served as an inspiration for older women.

‘Women in motion pictures have always had a difficult time being role models for other women,’ she observed. ‘They´ve always been considered glamorous in their jobs.’

In the series’ first season, Jessica wore clothes that were almost frumpy. Then she acquired smartness, Lansbury reasoning that, as a successful woman, Jessica should dress the part.

Murder, She Wrote stayed high in the ratings through its 11th year. Then CBS, seeking a younger audience for Sunday night, shifted the series to a less favorable midweek slot. Lansbury protested vigorously to no avail.

As expected, the ratings plummeted and the show was canceled. For consolation, CBS contracted for two-hour movies of Murder, She Wrote and other specials starring Lansbury.

Murder, She Wrote and other television work brought her 18 Emmy nominations but she never won one. She holds the record for the most Golden Globe nominations and wins for best actress in a television drama series and the most Emmy nominations for lead actress in a drama series.

In a 2008 Associated Press interview, Lansbury said she still welcomed the right script but did not want to play ‘old, decrepit women’.

‘I want women my age to be represented the way they are, which is vital, productive members of society.’

‘I’m astonished at the amount of stuff I managed to pack into the years that I have been in the business. And I´m still here!’

Source: | This article originally belongs to Daily Mail