Angela Lansbury
Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury (October 16, 1925 – October 11, 2022) was a British-American-Irish actress and singer. In a career spanning 80 years, she played various roles across stage and screen. She won numerous accolades including six Tony Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, a Laurence Olivier Award as well as nominations for three Academy Awards, 18 Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Grammy Award. She received the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 1997, the National Medal of the Arts in 1997, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2000, the Academy Honorary Award in 2013. She was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014.
Lansbury was born into an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. 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 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). During this time she established herself as a character actress earning three Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress nominations for Gaslight (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), and The Manchurian Candidate (1962).
On Broadway, she earned stardom as well as four Tony Awards for Best Actress in a Musical for her roles in Mame (1966), Dear World (1969), Gypsy (1975), and Sweeney Todd (1978). She returned to Broadway in Blithe Spirit (2009) where she won the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play. She was Tony-nominated for Deuce (2007) and A Little Night Music (2010). She won the Lifetime Achievement Tony Award in 2022.
She achieved worldwide fame for portraying the sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the NBC whodunit series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996), a role which earned her four Golden Globe Awards as well as nominations for 12 Primetime Emmy Awards. In 1989, she co-created with her husband Peter Shaw, Corymore Productions, a company where she co-produced the series and served as an executive producer. She voiced roles in Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Anastasia (1997) and acted in the family films Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018).
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