It was the moment her star finally began to soar – and the time of her life Dame Angela Lansbury always found the most painful to recall.
The British-born actress was already middle-aged when she broke through Broadway as the leading lady in smash-hit Mame, won her first Tony award, and found worldwide fame.
But away from the adoration and accolades, her family was falling apart as both her teenage children had become addicted to drugs.
That she could have done so well on stage and screen while, in her mind, so badly as a mother to her son Anthony and daughter Deirdre was clearly a constant source of guilt for the screen star, who died on Tuesday, five days short of her 97th birthday.
In an interview she recorded in 2001, which was meant to be released after her death, she admitted that, despite finding herself at the top of her profession, “it was not the happiest time”.
She added: “My life has always been divided into two parts – family and career. The sad part in my mind was that I didn’t succeed particularly well. The family suffered, the career soared.
“The children, we discovered, had fallen into the same traps as many kids during that period of our social history, they were into drugs.
“We had no recourse in those days, we really did not know what to do. It was a terrible, terrible time.”
The Murder, She Wrote star revealed how 16-year-old Deirdre had fallen under a perhaps even more dangerous spell, as a follower of cult leader and mass murderer Charles Manson.
“Deirdre was one of the youngsters who knew him – they were fascinated. He was an extraordinary character, charismatic in many ways, no question about it.”
Their involvement with hard drugs like heroin, and her daughter’s association with Manson, led Angela to make a drastic decision – she brought the whole family over to live in Ireland.
“I found this house, it had 20 acres and a walled garden. We started our life anew,” Angela recalled.
Just months after prising her children away from bad influences in Los Angeles, Manson’s followers would commit the horrendous Tate-LaBianca murders, killing seven people including pregnant actress Sharon Tate.
Refusing acting work, Angela spent a year dedicating her time to her kids. Instead of learning lines, she learned how to cook. The move worked and the family found stability.
Deirdre, now 69, runs an Italian restaurant in LA, while Anthony followed in his mother’s footsteps, directing 68 episodes of the detective show for which she is most famous.
She later told how the thought of what might have happened to her children “still fills me with dread”.
Angela said: “I’ve no doubt we would have lost one or both if they hadn’t been removed to a completely different milieu.”
Her removal from the industry didn’t damage her career. She would cement her place as one of the best British actresses of her generation.
In a career spanning seven decades she picked up six Golden Globes, six Tony awards and an Honorary Oscar – not bad for an actress who was never seen by Hollywood as a leading lady.
She was born on October 16, 1925 near Regent’s Park in London to Monya Macgill, a Belfast actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber firm owner and once a mayor of Poplar, East London. The family’s most famous member was her grandad George, the Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935, who had been an early crusader for women’s right to vote.
But when she was only nine her father died of stomach cancer aged 48. She remembered: “My mother found herself a widow with four children and her income was very much reduced. She sold everything.”
As war took over Europe, the family emigrated to New York on the last ship to leave Britain before German U-boats halted transatlantic crossings.
Two years later, they moved to LA, where 17-year-old Angela, who was selling cosmetics at a store, was spotted by a casting director. She was cast in a key role in Gaslight, which won her an Academy Award nomination as best supporting actress. Her next roles were in 1944’s National Velvet and 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which landed her a second Oscar nomination.
The same year, aged 19, she married actor Richard Cromwell, 15 years her senior, but the marriage lasted less than a year. She later said: “It never should have happened. It was something that he really tried to will himself into. But it was not possible, because he was a gay man.”
Soon after, in December 1946, she went on blind date with actor Peter Shaw. They wed in London in 1949 and were together until he died in 2003.
After a promising start, her career faltered, with the actress playing only minor roles in her next 11 MGM films.
In her final interview she said: “If I’d been knock-down fantastic, Betty Grable legs and, you know, this and this and this, maybe I would have been able to force them to build me into a big movie star.
“I was hampered by the fact I was, and I can say this in all honesty, I was too good an actress. I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”
The success she deserved finally came when she moved to Broadway, winning best actress awards in all four musicals in which she starred, including box office hits Gypsy and Sweeney Todd.
But it would be another five years before she would become a true household name with Murder, She Wrote in 1984, which ran for 12 seasons. Angela said: “Jessica Fletcher was probably about as close, not to me, but to the sort of woman I might have been had I not been an actress.”
She also found a new fanbase in 1991 as the voice of Mrs Potts in Disney hit Beauty and the Beast, and in 2009 she won her fifth Tony award as Madame Arcati in Broadway’s Blithe Spirit.
And she even returned to Broadway to play Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell in 2019 aged 94. “I’ve never been particularly aware of my age,” she once said. “It’s like being on a bicycle – I just put my foot down and keep going.”
The outpouring of tributes is testament to that resilience, and her formidable acting talent.
Asked what she would like her legacy to be, she said: “That through my acting, I enabled people to get out of their own lives and to be allowed to be transported into other areas of life that they otherwise would never have.
“I’d love to be able to feel that I enabled people to do that.”
