Angela Lansbury Biography

Share |

<A class="APCAnchor" HREF="http://affiliates.allposters.com/link/redirect.asp?AID=246987&PSTID=5&LTID=16&lang=1">Buy Posters at AllPosters.com </A>

More Movie Posters

Birth Date: October 16, 1925

Birth Place: Poplar, London, England, UK

Angela Lansbury has enjoyed a career without precedent. Her professional career spans more than half-a-century, during which she has flourished, first as a star of motion pictures, then as a four-time Tony Award-winning Broadway musical star, and most recently as the star of Murder, She Wrote, the longest running detective drama series in the history of television.

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on October 16, 1925. Her father, Edgar Isaac Lansbury, was a timber merchant. Her mother, Moyna Macgill, was a popular actress. At age ten, Lansbury saw John Gielgud as Hamlet at the Old Vic and vowed that someday she would become an actress. She attended the Webber-Douglas School of Dramatic Art in London.

In 1940, in order to escape the London Blitz, Moyna Macgill evacuated fourteen-year-old Lansbury and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce, to the United States. The family lived in Putnum County for a year, during which time Lansbury commuted to the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. She received her first professional job at age sixteen when she performed a cabaret act in Montreal.

Eventually the family relocated in Los Angeles where seventeen-year-old Lansbury landed a seven-year contract at MGM after director George Cukor cast her as Nancy, the menacing maid, in Gaslight. Her cunning performance won her a 1944 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The following year she received a second nomination, again as Best Supporting Actress, as the doomed Sybil Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray. That poignant role earned her a Golden Globe Award.

Lansbury has appeared in 44 motion pictures to date. They include such classics as National Velvet, The Harvey Girls, Frank Capra's State of the Union,Cecil B. DeMille's Samson and Delilah, The Court Jester, The Long Hot Summer, The Manchurian Candidate (for which she received a second Golden Globe Award, the National Board of Review Award and her third Academy Award nomination), The World of Henry Orient and Death on the Nile (a second National Board of Review Award). In 1991 she was the voice of Mrs. Potts in the Disney animated feature, Beauty and the Beast, and in 1997 she was the voice of the Grand Duchess Marie in the animated movie, Anastasia.

The actress made her Broadway debut in 1957 when she starred as Bert Lahr's wife in the French farce, Hotel Paradiso. In 1960 she returned to Broadway as Joan Plowright's mother in the season's most acclaimed drama, A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney.

In 1964, she starred on Broadway in her first musical. Anyone Can Whistle closed after only nine performances, but Lansbury returned to New York in triumph in 1966 as Mame. She played the role for two years on Broadway and later to sell-out audiences in Los Angeles and San Francisco. Mame earned Lansbury the first of her unprecedented four Tony Awards as Best Actress in a Musical. She received the others as the Madwoman of Chaillot in Dear World (1968), as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy and as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd (1979). In 1978 she starred as Mrs. Anna for a limited engagement of The King and I.

Concurrent with her musical ventures, Lansbury continued to act in serious dramas. In 1971 she returned to London to appear in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Edward Albee's All Over. In 1975, again in London, she played Gertrude to Albert Finney's Hamlet in the National Theatre production. In 1976 she acted in two Albee one-act plays, Counting the Ways and Listening, at the Hartford Stage Company.

She was to find her largest audience on television. Although Lansbury had acted in live dramas during "the golden age of television" in the 1950's in such shows as Robert Montgomery Presents and Lux Video Theatre, when she starred as Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the 1982 mini-series Little Gloria...Happy at Last, she had not acted on television in seventeen years. She followed that Emmy-nominated performance with roles in the mini-series Lace and A Christmas Story: The Gift of Love.

From 1984-1996 she starred as Jessica Fletcher, mystery-writing amateur sleuth, on Murder, She Wrote. In 1992, Lansbury added to her responsibilities by becoming the series' executive producer.

During the past decade she has also found time to star in the motion picture-for-television, Mrs 'Arris Goes to Paris, Shootdown, The Love She Sought and the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, The Shell Seekers. She developed a video and co-wrote a book, both titled Positive Moves, about fitness and well-being.

After Murder She Wrote concluded its twelve season run in May 1996, Lansbury returned to her theatrical roots by starring in Mrs Santa Claus, the first original musical for television in four decades.

In 1997 Lansbury appeared in South by Southwest, the first of a series of two hour Murder, She Wrote movies for CBS. In 1998 she completed The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax, which also aired on CBS. In Spring of 2000, Angela completed the second of the Murder, She Wrote movies, A Story to Die For.

She has been unstinting of her time with scores of civic involvements, ranging from the American Red Cross to the Salvation Army. As a member of the AmFAR National Council, her energies in the war against AIDS have raised several millions of dollars. She is the National spokesperson for Childreach.

In 1982 she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 1990 she received an honourary doctorate in humanities from Boston University. In 1992 she received the Silver Mask for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 1994 she was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1996 she was inducted into the TV Hall of Fame, and in 1997 she was given a Lifetime Achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.

She has been nominated for 16 Emmy Awards (twelve for Murder, She Wrote). She has won six Golden Globe Awards (four for Murder, She Wrote) and has been nominated for an additional eight. In September 1997 President Clinton presented her with the National Medal of the Arts. In November of 1999, Meadows School of the Arts at Texas' Southern Methodist University presented Lansbury with their Lifetime Achievement Award. In December of 2000, Lansbury was recipient of a Kennedy Center Honor in Washington D.C.