Actors - Angela Lansbury

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	Actors - Angela Lansbury

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born October 16, 1925) is an Oscar-nominated English-American actress.

Early life

Lansbury was born in London, the daughter of a Belfast-born actress, Moyna MacGill and the granddaughter of Labour politician George Lansbury. At age 14 , when World War II began, she emigrated with her mother to the United States and became a naturalised citizen in 1951.

As a struggling young actress in Los Angeles, Lansbury worked at the Bullocks Wilshire department store.

Career

Lansbury made her Academy Award nominated film debut in 1944 as an impertinent maid in the film Gaslight
with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This performance was followed by another Oscar nomination for the Oscar Wilde film The Picture of Dorian Gray
(1945). She has since enjoyed a long and varied career, mainly as a film actress, appearing in everything from Samson and Delilah (1949) to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks
(1971).

Lansbury was in The Manchurian Candidate
(1962) as the initially merely overbearing mother of a brainwashed assassin whose evil only grows through the course of the film. She won much well-deserved praise for her chilling performance, and won her a third Oscar nomination. In the film, Lansbury's son was played by Laurence Harvey, who was only three years younger than she. Lansbury has been quoted in an interview with CNN's Larry King as saying that this was her favorite of her many film roles.

She played Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd
(1980). She then turned to character voice work in animated films like The Last Unicorn
(1982), winning a great deal of praise for her affectionate turn as the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit Beauty and the Beast
(1991). She also did character work as the Dowager Empress in the less well-received animated film Anastasia in 1997.

On Broadway, Lansbury received good reviews from her very first musical outing, the short-lived 1964 Stephen Sondheim musical Anyone Can Whistle, which co-starred Lee Remick. Starting in 1966, her long-running portrayal as Jerry Herman's Mame
, opposite Bea Arthur as Vera, earned Lansbury her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Subsequent Tony awards were earned for Dear World (1969) and the first Broadway revival of Gypsy
(1974). She is a two-time winner of the Sarah Siddons Award (1975 & 1980) for dramatic achievement in Chicago theatre. Her English music-hall turn as meat-pie entrepreneuse Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim's ballad opera Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street earned her yet another Tony Award in 1979. She has received a Tony nomination for every lead role she has essayed on Broadway, and won each time (total of 4 times), unlike her unlucky record at the Oscars.

As Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984 - 1996), she found her biggest success and a worldwide following. It was to be one of the longest running prime time detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world and a record as the most nominated lead actress without a win in the prime time Emmy awards (with 12 nominations).

In the early 1990s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom awarded Angela Lansbury the CBE. She was named a Disney Legend in 1995. She received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.

Private life

Lansbury was briefly married from 1945-46 to American actor Richard Cromwell when she was 19 and Cromwell was 35. In 1948, Lansbury remarried, to Irish-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw, who had been a former boyfriend of the much-older actress, Joan Crawford. Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Ms. Lansbury's career. Until Shaw's death in 2003, Lansbury enjoyed one of the longest and most prolific of show-business marriages.

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Actors - Angela Lansbury

Early life

Career

Private life

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