Angela Lansbury

Jessica Fletcher

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE was born October 16, 1925 in England has been nominated for the Academy Award 3 times and the Emmy 4 times , six-time winner of the Tony and six-time winner of the Golden Globe. A singer best known for her work in film, her award-winning tenures on Broadway in such musicals as Mame, Gypsy, and Sweeney Todd, and her performance in the starring role of Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote. She holds the record for most Emmy nominations without winning an award, with eighteen nominations to her name.

Her multi-faceted career has spanned seven decades, and she is well known for her roles on both stage and screen. Lansbury has enjoyed a long and varied career, mainly as a film actress in roles generally older than her actual age, appearing in everything from Samson and Delilah (1949) to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Her notable credits include The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in which she played Mrs. Iselin, the cold-blooded mother of a war veteran brainwashed into becoming a Communist assassin. She won much critical praise for her performance, and received her third Oscar nomination. (Lucille Ball had been considered for the role; a decade later, Ball coincidentally landed the title role in the film version of Mame, the role Lansbury had created on Broadway.)

After many years focused on the theatre, Lansbury returned to film, playing Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978). She was somewhat less successful as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980). Lansbury then turned to character voice work in animated films like The Last Unicorn (1982) and as the Dowager Empress in the animated film Anastasia in 1997. Her most famous voice work was the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit Beauty and the Beast (1991), who performed the Oscar-winning title song written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. She reprised the role in "Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas" (1997).

Lansbury found her biggest success and a worldwide following as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984 - 1996), which was the longest running detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world. In the early 1990s, the Queen appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire. She was named a Disney Legend in 1995. She received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, Kennedy Center Honors in 2000, and has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

In 1945, Lansbury married American actor Richard Cromwell when she was 19 and he was 35. Unbeknownst to her, Cromwell was bisexual, and the marriage dissolved after a year, but the two remained friends. In 1949, Lansbury married Irish-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw, who had been a former boyfriend of Joan Crawford. Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Lansbury's career. Until his death in 2003, they enjoyed one of the longest show-business marriages on record.