Angela was still only 17 when she landed the role in Gaslight, and this set a pattern of playing older than her age. Nothing much happened at first, so mother and daughter took jobs as sales clerks at Bullocks Wilshire, the art deco department store in Los Angeles, while continuing to audition. When Moyna’s agent sent her to Hollywood for an audition, she decided to move the children out there with her.Īngela Lansbury and Charles Boyer in Gaslight, 1944, which brought her first Oscar nomination. While her mother toured Canada in a variety show for the troops, Angela did cabaret turns in Montreal. Her father died in 1934, and her mother merged her family – Angela and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce – with that of a former British Army colonel in India, Lecki Forbes, under one roof in Hampstead.Īt the outbreak of war, Moyna decamped with her children to New York, and Angela continued her training for two more years at the Feagin school. She was educated at South Hampstead high school for girls and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. One of her cousins was Oliver Postgate, the British animator best known for Bagpuss. She came from strong, muscular stock: her father, Edgar Lansbury, was a lumber merchant and one-time member of the Communist party and mayor of Poplar (his father was George Lansbury, a reforming leader of the Labour party) her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an Irish actor who took Angela to the Old Vic theatre in London from an early age. Peter Shaw, whom she had married in 1949, was joint director of the production company her son, Anthony, and stepson, David, were executive producers, her brother Bruce was supervising producer.įamily was always of paramount importance to Lansbury. She gradually assumed ownership of the CBS series. “It really was a fluke success,” Lansbury said, “and came at a time when that kind of family entertainment seemed needed.” She added that, of all the characters she played, Fletcher was the one most like herself: intuitive and sensitive, a voice of calm and reason in a troubled time. She played the incisive and level-headed Jessica Fletcher, a retired English teacher, mystery writer and amateur sleuth in the coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine, a sleepy location with a criminal body count as delightfully high and unlikely as in Midsomer Murders.
Gaslight with angela lansbury series#
Photograph: Everett Collection Inc/Alamyīut she became best known worldwide for Murder, She Wrote, an American television series running from 1984 to 1996, with four subsequent TV films.
This versatility, allied to her natural grace, vitality and chastely appealing features – her eyes were full, blue and unblinking, her face almost perfectly round, her mouth a cupid’s bow from the studio era – propelled her to stage stardom in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966) and, in London at the Piccadilly theatre in 1973, as the show-stopping Mama Rose in Gypsy, by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.Īngela Lansbury with, front left, Lisa Peluso and Bonnie Langford in the 1974 Broadway production of Gypsy. She graduated to play Laurence Harvey’s evil, possibly incestuous, mother – although she was only three years older than Harvey – in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and then a dotty amateur witch in Disney’s follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). On her film debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win one. Although she was born in London, and retained a classic English poise all her life, Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, was a Hollywood and Broadway star for more than seven decades, and one who was completely unclassifiable.
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