Who Was Angela Lansbury? Broadway Icon Passes Away Aged 96

Angela Lansbury, the British actor who kicked up her heels in the Broadway musicals Mame and Gypsy and solved murders as crime novelist Jessica Fletcher in the long-running TV series Murder, She Wrote, has passed away. She was 96.

Lansbury died Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles, according to a statement from her three children. She died five days shy of her 97th birthday.

Who Was Angela Lansbury?

Born in 1925 in London, Angela later moved to New York and attended the Feagin School of Dramatic Art. She was one of the last surviving stars of the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. The three-time Oscar nominee had a career spanning eight decades, across film, theatre and television.

Lansbury won five Tony Awards for her Broadway performances and a lifetime achievement award. She earned Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress for two of her first three films, Gaslight (1945) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1946), and was nominated again in 1962 for The Manchurian Candidate and her deadly portrayal of a Communist agent and the title character’s mother.

But it was her portrayal of sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, She Wrote which gained her millions of fans across the world. She took up the role in 1984, and continued for 12 years and nine seasons. According to BBC, the show made her one of the wealthiest women in the US at the time, with a fortune estimated at $100m.

She was also felicitated with an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement, aged 88 in 2013. During the ceremony, fellow actor Geoffrey Rush praised her as the "living definition of range". It followed a lifetime achievement award from Bafta in 2002, as well as a star on the Hollywood walk of fame.

Queen Elizabeth II made Lansbury a Dame in 2014 for actor's services to drama, charitable work and philanthropy.

Lansbury had a disastrous nine-month marriage to Richard Cromwell in the mid-1940s when she was 19. In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, a British actor and producer. They remained together for more than 50 years, until his death in 2003. The couple had two children; he had a son from a previous marriage.

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