DAME Angela Lansbury was the last surviving actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age, who also dominated TV screens in Murder, She Wrote.
Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, and Frank Sinatra were her movie co-stars when she was 19, and she was nominated in 1944 for her first Oscar.
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Angela then embarked on a spectacular stage career before taking on TV, as sleuth Jessica Fletcher — solving 264 murders along the way.
Generations of children will remember her voice as a teapot and the title song in 1991 Disney classic Beauty and the Beast.
In her personal life, she sometimes suffered — unsuspectingly marrying a gay man at the age of 19, and later watching both her children plunge into drug addiction.
She once said: “I haven’t had it easy… but in most cases, I’ve had such damn good luck.”
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925, at her parents’ flat near Regent’s Park in London.
Her mother Moyna Macgill, an actress from Belfast, was her father Edgar Lansbury, a politician who was mayor of Poplar East London.
But the family’s most famous member was her grandad George, the Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935 who had been an early crusader for women’s right to vote.
Tragic events struck May 1935, when her father, who was 48 years old, died from stomach cancer.
Angela, then nine years old, said later: “Nothing before or since has affected me so deeply.”
Mother Moyna became quickly the mistress of a “military gentleman”He moved the family in Hampstead (North London) with him. Angela later said that Angela’s mother died in 1940. “wanted to get away from it”.
She continued: “But she also recognised the fact that Britain was likely to be bombed.”
The family moved to New York in 1940 and then two years later to Los Angeles. Angela was seen walking on the MGM studio lot by a casting director.
She was cast in the key role of Gaslight before she even knew it. She began filming her screen debut at the age of 17 alongside Charles Boyer, Bergman, and Charles Boyer.
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It earned her an Academy Award nomination in Best Supporting Actress. She would receive the first three Oscar nominations.
Her next roles were in 1944’s National Velvet and 1945’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, which landed her a second Oscar nomination.
At 19 she married Richard Cromwell (15 years her junior). Later, she said: “I had no idea I was marrying a gay man.”
The marriage lasted for less than one year.
In December 1946, Angela was on a blind date when she met Peter Shaw.
They were married in London in 1949, and they were together until Peter’s death in 2003. In 1952, Anthony was born and Deidre in 1953.
She played Elvis’s mum in Blue Hawaii and alomgside Sinatra in 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate.
However, she found it harder to find roles in films so her next success was from Broadway.
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In 1966, she was the opening night star of Mame musical and won the title part. Her children were shocked when she gained new fame at 40.
Angela later stated that they were “disoriented”They both started to take up drugs. Deidre even fell in with Charles Manson’s evil cult, so Angela moved the family to a farm in Ireland.
She still did the odd film, such as 1971’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks, but by the early 1980s it was time to try something new. She is now 59, and she’s back in LA. She was asked to portray Jessica Fletcher, a murder-solving crime writer, in Murder, She Wrote.
The show was a huge success when it premiered in 1984. She spoke highly of her character: “She was valiant and liberal and athletic and exciting and sexy and all kinds of good stuff that women of a certain age are, and are not given credit for.”
Her fanbase grew in 1991 when she became the voice of Mrs Potts, the teapot in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.
Angela was presented with a lifetime achievement prize at the Oscars and made a Dame in 2013. At 89, she was awarded her first Olivier Award.
The 2020 death of Olivia de Havilland left her as the last surviving actress of Hollywood’s Golden Age.
Angela said: “I’ve worked with the greatest actors, and they’re all gone. This is what’s so desperate to me.”