The British-born actress Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, turned her back on a Hollywood film career to find acclaim as a star of stage musicals, then gained her longest-lasting fame on television in Murder, She Wrote as Jessica Fletcher, the best-selling author of mystery novels who solves real-life crimes.
The American series was small-screen detective drama at its most formulaic – Jessica arrives in a town, meets friends, family or business associates, someone is found dead, the wrong person is arrested, then she does her own detective work and unmasks the killer.
It proved globally popular, running for 264 episodes (1984-96) and four feature-length stories (1997-2003) before remaining a staple of television schedules with unending repeats.
Lansbury believed the character’s popularity lay in the ageing sleuth possessing “everywoman” qualities and that she was a role model for older female viewers.
“I’ve spent all these years building the character of Jessica into a first-class, highly intelligent, vivacious, energetic and hopefully lovable woman,” she told her biographer, Martin Gottfried. The success of Murder, She Wrote was credited with the creation of programmes such as The Golden Girls.
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in Regent’s Park, London, in 1925 – and frequently corrected the misconception that she was a cockney from Poplar, where her paternal grandfather, George, a Labour MP who went on to become party leader, brought up his children. Her father, Edgar, was a timber merchant and local councillor who died of stomach cancer when she was nine and her mother, Moyna MacGill, was a Belfast-born actor.
Lansbury attended South Hampstead High School and, with acting ambitions herself, started training at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art (1939-40), but her studies ended when German bombing intensified during the Second World War.
She was taken to New York by her mother, along with her brothers Edgar and Bruce, twins who later became film producers. Her half-sister, Isolde, from her mother’s first marriage, stayed in Britain, having just married actor Peter Ustinov. In New York, Lansbury studied at the Feagin School of Dramatic Radio and Arts (1940-42).
While her mother was working in Canada, she made her professional debut singing Noel Coward songs in a Montreal nightclub. MacGill then moved to Los Angeles to revive her film career and Lansbury followed.
Recommended by John Van Druten, a friend of her mother’s who had written a screen adaptation of the Patrick Hamilton play Gaslight, she was cast in the 1944 film as Nancy Oliver, the conniving cockney maid, alongside Ingrid Bergman. The role won her a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination and she signed a seven-year contract with MGM.
National Velvet (1944) followed, then she was an Oscar nominee again as Sibyl Vane, the tragic working-class music-hall singer who falls in love with the title character, in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).
Lansbury was a month off her 20th birthday when, in 1945, she married actor-turned-artist Richard Cromwell. They divorced a year later after it emerged that he was gay. However, she found the love of her life in British actor and agent Peter Shaw. Their 1949 marriage lasted for 54 years, until his death in 2003. The couple became naturalised US citizens in 1951.
Although Lansbury had appeared in more than a dozen films by then, she was frustrated by the roles that came her way – often older, unsympathetic women. She left MGM in 1952 and continued in Hollywood but found herself cast in maternal roles. She was still only 35 when she played the mother of 25-year-old Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii (1961).
I was very happy to wave goodbye to Hollywood, it has never understood my talent, didn’t really know how to use me
Eventually, Lansbury put films behind her to concentrate on stage musicals. “I was very happy to wave goodbye to Hollywood,” she told Mark Lawson in a 2014 radio interview. “Hollywood has never understood my talent, didn’t really know how to use me.”
She excepted a few directors such as John Frankenheimer, who cast her as the manipulative mother of Warren Beatty’s womaniser in All Fall Down and the mother of Laurence Harvey’s Soviet-brainwashed Korean War soldier in The Manchurian Candidate (both 1962) – older characters again (Harvey was only three years her junior, Beatty 12), but with more depth. The latter won her a third Oscar nomination.
On stage, Lansbury made her Broadway debut as Marcelle in Hotel Paradiso (Henry Miller’s Theatre, 1957) and played Helen, Jo’s “slapper” mother, in the original New York production of A Taste of Honey (Lyceum and Booth Theatres, 1960-61), directed by Tony Richardson and George Devine.
Her transition to musicals heralded a successful new phase in Lansbury’s career, although her first role, as a crooked mayoress in Arthur Laurents and Stephen Sondheim’s flop Anyone Can Whistle (Majestic Theatre, 1964) was short-lived.
Acting the glamorous Mame Dennis in Jerry Herman’s Mame (Winter Garden Theatre, 1966-9) – after it was turned down by Rosalind Russell, who took the role in the non-musical stage and film versions – brought Lansbury a flood of gushing reviews and a Tony Award as Best Leading Actress in a Musical. However, Warner Brothers did not consider her a big enough star for the 1974 film version, which featured a disappointing Lucille Ball.
More Tony Awards came Lansbury’s way for her performances as Countess Aurelia in Dear World (Mark Hellinger Theatre, 1969), Rose in Gypsy (Winter Garden Theatre, 1974-5, after a 1973 West End run at the Piccadilly Theatre) and Mrs Lovett in Sweeney Todd (Uris Theatre, 1979-80). She also stood in briefly for Constance Towers as Anna in The King and I revival (Uris Theatre, 1978).
Musical stardom led Lansbury to be cast as witch Eglantine Price in the 1971 Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks, combining live action with animation and bringing her cinematic longevity.
Later, she enjoyed recognition for her performance in a straight play – as dotty medium Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit (Shubert Theatre, 2009) – with another Tony Award.
By then, Murder, She Wrote had made Lansbury a star the world over, but she and her husband had to deal with problems in their private life. They discovered that their children, Anthony and Deidre, were drug addicts and Deidre had associated with convicted murderer Charles Manson.
In 1970, when their Malibu house was razed in a bush fire and Anthony – who later became an actor and director – suffered a heroin overdose, Lansbury and Shaw uprooted the family to rural Ireland for a quieter life.
In London, Lansbury had straight dramatic roles as the Mistress in All Over with the Royal Shakespeare Company (Aldwych Theatre, 1972) and Gertrude in Hamlet (Old Vic Theatre, 1975-6) with the National Theatre Company, both to mixed reviews.
There were occasional film parts, too. Playing a drunken romantic writer in Agatha Christie’s Death on the Nile (1978) led her to be cast as a fairly un-eccentric but sweet-natured Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d (1980) – a precursor to Jessica Fletcher.
She was back at Disney Studios to voice Mrs Potts, the singing teapot, in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and play the Balloon Lady in Mary Poppins Returns (2018).
She also acted disapproving, short-sighted Aunt Adelaide in Nanny McPhee (2005) and restaurant owner Mrs Van Gundy in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011). In 2014, American cinemas screened her performance as the title character in the stage play Driving Miss Daisy on tour in Australia the previous year. That came after a return to Broadway as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of A Little Night Music (Walter Kerr Theatre, 2009-10).
Lansbury, who was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2013, a Bafta Lifetime Achievement Award in 2002 and the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre in 2015, was made CBE in 1994 and a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014.
She is survived by Anthony and Deidre, and her stepson, David Shaw.
Angela Brigid Lansbury, actor and singer, born 16 October 1925, died 11 October 2022
