Angela Lansbury was cast as older villains at nineteen before becoming Jessica Fletcher
At 17, Angela Lansbury was working a department store counter in Los Angeles for 28 dollars a week. Months later she had an MGM contract and an Oscar nomination. Then the studio spent a decade casting her as scheming older women, and her real stardom arrived only in middle age.
Born in London in 1925, Lansbury came from a family split between stage and politics. Her mother, Moyna Macgill, was a Belfast-born actress; her father, the timber merchant Edgar Lansbury, had been mayor of Poplar, and her grandfather George Lansbury led the Labour Party. Her father died when she was nine, and she coped by acting out characters, becoming what she called a complete movie maniac. When the Blitz began, her mother took a job supervising 60 evacuee children on a ship to Canada, bringing Angela and her twin brothers along.
Hollywood came quickly. At a party her mother hosted, the writer John van Druten suggested her for the cockney maid in Gaslight; because she was still a minor, a social worker had to accompany her on set. The role won her an Academy Award nomination and a seven-year MGM contract at 500 dollars a week. The Picture of Dorian Gray brought a Golden Globe and a second nomination. Yet the studio kept her among its second-tier names, and George Cukor felt she was consistently miscast. She complained that she wanted Jean Arthur's parts while Louis B. Mayer gave her a string of nasty schemers.
Her private life was turbulent early on. A 1945 marriage to Richard Cromwell, who was gay and hoped marriage might change that, ended within a year, though they stayed friends. In 1949 she married Peter Shaw, a fellow English expatriate, in a Church of Scotland church in London because the Church of England would not wed divorced people.
After MGM, The Manchurian Candidate in 1962 won wide acclaim, and Mame on Broadway in 1966 brought the first of her six Tony Awards. Television made her famous worldwide: from 1984 she played the sleuth Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote across 12 seasons. She also voiced Mrs Potts in Beauty and the Beast, was made a dame in 2014, and died in 2022.
Source: Angela Lansbury
