Angela Lansbury (96) died, became world famous for “Murder, She Wrote”

• Petra Steenhoff

  online publisher

British actress Angela Lansbury (96) has passed away, her family has announced. She became famous around the world as the investigator Jessica Fletcher in the television series Murder, he wrote. It was one of the longest-running series in American television history, broadcast around the world between 1984 and 1996.

Born in London in 1925, Lansbury emigrated with her mother, actress Moyna Mac Gill, to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. Her father, son of the Labor politician George Lansbury, was already dead. In 1951 she was naturalized American.

He took acting lessons in New York and signed a contract with MGM when he was 17. For her first film, Gas light, starring Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, earned her an Oscar nomination. A year later she happened again for the role of her in The portrait of Dorian Gray. She didn’t win the Oscars, but for her role in Dorian gray received a Golden Globe.

Watch Angela Lansbury, Joan Collins and Diana Winter perform at the 1959 Oscars ceremony below.

Lansbury would star in 11 other MGM films, mostly mediocre. Despite her young age, she has often been chosen to play an elderly woman or a mother. She didn’t look old, but she radiated a kind of maturity that made it possible.

He left MGM unsatisfied with the roles he was getting. But even when she started working as a freelance actress, she was often cast for roles of older women.

One of those films was The candidate from Manchuria (1962) in which she is only three years older than her co-star Laurence Harvey who plays her son in the film. The evil mother he played is considered to be one of the best acting performances of him. This role also earned her an Oscar nomination, which, to her great disappointment, was not cashed again.

Lansbury married actor Peter Pullen Shaw in 1949 and had two children in the following years. Since the mid-1950s she has also been seen regularly on television in various series and was a regular guest on the game show Pantomime quiz.

He made his Broadway debut in 1957 a Hotel Paradiso and went on to star in several plays and musicals that earned her four Tony Awards.

1970 was a disastrous year for the actress. Her husband underwent hip surgery, her son Anthony narrowly survived a drug overdose, and her California home was burned to ashes. The family moved to a farm in Ireland, where Anthony was recovering from his heroin and cocaine addiction.

Lansbury played a few successful stage roles in London’s West End in the 1970s, including Everywhere in gypsy. In 1978, she returned to the big screen for the first time in seven years as writer and murder victim Salome Otterbourne in the film adaptation of Agatha Christie. Death on the Nile.

Two years later, she starred in another film adaptation of Agatha Christie, this time in the role of Miss Marple The broken mirror. It was too his voice can be heard in various animated films, such as The beauty and the Beast in Anastasia.

In 1983 he received two offers for television series. Against all advice, she chose not the role in a sitcom, but that of retired writer and detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder, he wrote. The role of her turned out to be perfect for her and the series became a huge success.

After the last episode in 1996, Lansbury returned to the theater where she appeared in several productions on Broadway and in the West End. Her last role was that of Madame Arcati in Cheerful spirit in 2014 at the Gielgud Theater in London.

Angela Lansbury has been nominated 18 times for an Emmy Award, including 12 for her role in Murder, he wrote, but he never won one. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts by US President Clinton in 1997 and in 2013 she received an honorary Oscar for all her work.

In 2014 she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth, earning the title of “Lady” Angela Lansbury.