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Angela Lansbury Profile
Angela Lansbury was an Irish-British-American actress and singer who played various roles across film, stage, and television. Her career, much of it in the United States, spanned eight decades, and her work received much international attention.
Angela Lansbury Age
Lansbury is 98 years old as of 2023. She was born on 16th October 1925, in London, United Kingdom. She celebrated her birthdays on 16th October every year.
Angela Lansbury Height
She stands at a height of 5 feet 6 inches tall.
Angela Lansbury Early Career
To escape the Blitz, she moved to the United States in 1940, studying acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed with MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944), National Velvet (1944), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in eleven further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952, she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances.
Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her role in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is often cited as one of her career-best performances, earning her a third Academy Award nomination. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which won her first Tony Award and established her as a gay icon.
Angela Lansbury Family
Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family on 16 October 1925 in the district of St Pancras in Central London. Her birthplace is sometimes given, wrongly, as Poplar, East London. Lansbury said that she had ancestral connections to Poplar but was born in Regent’s Park, Central London. Lansbury’s mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna Macgill (born Charlotte Lillian McIldowie), who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films.
Her father was the wealthy English timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar. Additionally, her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader and anti-war activist George Lansbury, a man whom she felt “awed” by and considered “a giant in my youth”.
Angela had an older half-sister, Isolde, who was the daughter of Moyna’s previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham. In January 1930, when Angela was four, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Bruce and Edgar.
Leading the Lansburys to move from their Poplar flat to a house in Mill Hill, North London. On weekends they would vacate to a rural farm in Berrick Salome, near Wallingford, Oxfordshire. Lansbury was a cousin of the Postgate family, including the animator, writer, and social activist Oliver Postgate. She is also a second cousin of the academic and novelist Coral Lansbury, whose son Malcolm Turnbull was Prime Minister of Australia from 2015 to 2018.
Angela Lansbury Education
When Lansbury was nine, her father died from stomach cancer and she retreated into playing characters as a coping mechanism. Facing financial difficulty, her mother became engaged to a Scottish colonel, Leckie Forbes, and moved into his house in Hampstead, with Lansbury receiving an education at South Hampstead High School from 1934 until 1939.
She nevertheless considered herself largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre, and cinema. She became a self-professed “complete movie maniac”, visiting the cinema regularly and imagining herself as certain characters.
Keen on playing the piano, she briefly studied music at the Rotman School of Dancing, and in 1940 began studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington. Additionally, West London first appeared onstage as a lady-in-waiting in the school’s production of Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland.
Moreover, that year, Angela’s grandfather died, and with the onset of the Blitz, Macgill decided to take Angela, Bruce, and Edgar to the United States; Isolde remained in Britain with her new husband, the actor Peter Ustinov. Moreover, MacGill secured a job supervising 60 British children who were being evacuated to North America aboard the Duchess of Atholl, arriving with them in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in mid-August.
From there, she proceeded by train to New York City, where she was financially sponsored by a Wall Street businessman, Charles T. Smith, who moved in with his family at their home in Mahopac, New York. Additionally, Lansbury gained a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing allowing her to study at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, where she appeared in performances of William Congreve’s The Way of the World and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. Moreover, she graduated in March 1942, by which time the family had moved to a flat on Morton Street in Greenwich Village in the New York City borough of Manhattan.
Angela Lansbury Husband and Children
Lansbury was married twice, first to actor Richard Cromwell when she was nineteen and Cromwell was 35. They eloped and were married in a small civil ceremony on 27 September 1945. They divorced in 1946 but remained friends until he died in 1960. In 1949, Lansbury married actor and producer Peter Shaw, and they remained together for 54 years until his death in 2003.
She acquired a stepson, David, from Shaw’s first marriage. They had two children of their own, Anthony Peter and Deirdre Ann (b. 1953). While Lansbury repeatedly stated that she wanted to put her children before her career, she admitted that she often had to leave them in California for long periods when she was working elsewhere.
She brought up her children to be Episcopalian, although they were not members of a congregation. She stated, “I believe that God is within all of us, that we are perfect, precious beings, and that we have to put our faith and trust in that.” In the latter part of the 1960s, Anthony and Deirdre became involved in the growing counterculture movement and started using recreational drugs.
Deirdre developed an acquaintance with the Manson family, while Anthony became addicted to cocaine and heroin, overcoming them in 1971. After recovering, Anthony became a television director and directed 68 episodes of Murder, She Wrote. Furthermore, Deirdre married a chef, and together they opened a restaurant in West Los Angeles. Lansbury had three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren at the time of her death in 2022.
Angela Lansbury Death
In early life, Lansbury was a chain smoker but she conquered the addiction in the mid-1960s. In 1976 and 1987, she had cosmetic surgery on her neck to prevent it from broadening with age. During the 1990s, she began to have arthritis. Lansbury underwent hip replacement surgery in May 1994 and knee replacement surgery in 2005. Lansbury died in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles, California, at 1:30 a.m. Pacific time on 11 October 2022, five days before her 97th birthday.
Angela Lansbury Career
She was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema at the time of her death. She is the recipient of numerous accolades, including six Tony Awards (including Lifetime Achievement Award), six Golden Globe Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award, and the Academy Honorary Award, in addition to nominations for three Academy Awards, eighteen Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award.
Beauty and the Beast and other roles
Throughout the run of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury had continued making appearances in other television films, miniseries, and cinema. Furthermore, in 1986, she co-hosted the New York Philharmonic’s televised tribute to the centenary of the Statue of Liberty with Kirk Douglas. Furthermore, she appeared as the protagonist’s mother in Rage of Angels: The Story Continues (1986) and portrayed Nan Moore – the mother of a victim of the real-life Korean Air Lines Flight 007 plane crash – in Shootdown (1988); being a mother herself, she had been “enormously touched by the incident”.
Lansbury was featured in The Shell Seekers (1989) as an Englishwoman recuperating from a heart attack and starred in The Love She Sought (1990), also known as A Green Journey, as an American school teacher who falls in love with a Catholic priest (played by Denholm Elliott) while visiting Ireland; Lansbury thought it “a marvelous woman’s story”.
She next starred as the Cockney Mrs. Harris in a film adaptation of the novel Mrs. Arris Goes to Paris (1992), which was directed by her son and executive produced by her stepson. Her highest profile cinematic role since The Manchurian Candidate was as the voice of the motherly teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney animation Beauty and the Beast (1991), an appearance that she considered to be a gift to her three grandchildren.
Lansbury performed the title song to the film, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song, Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song, and Grammy Award for Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, Television, or Other Visual Media. Additionally, her work on Beauty and the Beast garnered her nominations for a Grammy Award for Album of the Year, as well as for an Awards Circuit Community Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.
In 2021, Lansbury made a surprise appearance referencing her role as Mrs. Potts on the audio guide of “Inspiring Walt Disney: The Animation of French Decorative Arts”, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s first-ever exhibition about Walt Disney and his Studios. It was likely her last recorded performance.
Angela Lansbury Movies and TV Shows
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88 Credits
Homicide: Hours to Kill
2019
Little Women on Masterpiece as Aunt March
Little Women on Masterpiece
2018
The Best of Hollywood
2017
Little Women as Aunt March
Little Women
2017
A Night at the Movies
A Night at the Movies
2012
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit as Eleanor Duvall
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
2005
Law & Order: Trial by Jury
2005
Touched by an Angel as Penelope Berrington
Touched by an Angel
2002
Murder, She Wrote as Jessica Fletcher
Murder, She Wrote
1996
Newhart as Cameo
Newhart
1990
Angela Lansbury Net Worth
Her net worth was $70 million, according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Angela Lansbury Social Media Platforms
She has 12.7k followers on Instagram and 4k followers on Facebook.
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