She caused a sensation in Hollywood and Broadway, but she attracted the largest audience of her career with the role of Detective Jessica Fletcher in the 12-year super-long series "Murder, She Wrote." © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
She was nominated for an Oscar when she debuted on screen at the age of 18 and won her 5th (Broadway play) Tony Award at the age of 83.
She has been stereotyped as a second-level role by Hollywood for "not having a pretty face" and "not having a pair of sexy beautiful legs", either playing an old aunt much older than her, or playing "a bitch on the wheel and a mother of people".
She died when she was 9 years old, her grandfather died when she was 14, she moved from England to the United States in World War II, she was married at 19 (her husband is gay)... After that, her house was destroyed by a bushfire, and her son and daughter took drugs... She was forced to drop everything and return to Ireland with her family, bought a house in the countryside by the sea, and became a serious gardener...
Later, the TV series "Female Writer and Murder", which made her popular for 12 years, his husband is a producer and his son is one of the directors.
"I wanted to make a great movie before I left. I don't know what it will be, but I think somewhere there will be one. ”
Angela Lansbury is an awesome actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a darling of Broadway musicals in middle age, and then attracted millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer in the long-running television series Murder, She Wrote.
From "Mame" in 1966 to "Blithe Spirit" in 2009, when she was 83, Ms. Lansbury won five Tony Awards for her role on the New York stage, a testament to her extraordinary endurance. However, during her 70-year film, theater and television career, she only appeared on Broadway from time to time, and there were also years that did not go well.
Ms. Lancebury played Mrs. Arcati in the 2009 production of Blithe Spirit, from left by Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role earned Ms. Lancebury her fifth Tony Award. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Born in England, she was the daughter of an Irish actress who was just 18 when she landed her first film role, playing Charles Boyer's cheeky servant from London's East End in the thriller Gaslight (1944), a precocious screen debut role that brought her a contract with MGM and an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. In 1946, she was nominated for a second Oscar for her role as a ballroom girl in The Picture of Dorian Gray.
It was a dizzying start for a young woman who had just graduated from the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York after fleeing wartime London with her mother at the age of 14. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a lead actress, but, in a 2009 interview with The New York Times, she said she was reluctant to try to climb that ladder.
"I'm not very good at being a star," she said. "I don't want to pose for things like cheesecake photos."
It could also be a problem with the bones. Her full, round face didn't quite fit the dramatic lighting of the time, when it was better suited to the angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any case, before playing the charming, crazy aunt in Broadway's "Mamu", she starred in many movies with little presence.
MGM often asked her to play an older woman, or a nasty woman. Of the 11 films made after The Portrait of Dorian Gray, her most notable role was in State of the Union (1948), where she worked with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper tycoon trying to get her married lover elected president.
When her MGM contract expired in 1951, Ms. Lansbury toured the country for two stage plays, Remains to Be Seen and Affairs of State. But when she returned to film as a freelance actress, she once again found herself playing two types of roles: as she puts it, "the bitch on the wheel and the mother of the people."
Ms. Lansbury and Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). She plays a witch. © Disney
She was the possessive mother of Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii (1961). She was the sinister mother of Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), a role that earned her a third Oscar nomination for supporting actress. (Although she was only three years older than Mr. Harvey, her maternal authority was completely convincing when she told him, "You're going to shoot a presidential candidate in the head.") She played a woman who killed her husband in Please Murder Me (1956) and a domineering mother in The Reluctant Debutante (1958). And so it began.
Enter Broadway
Ms. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in Hotel Paradiso, based on a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theatrical productions. In 1960, she played an alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenage girl in A Taste of Honey.
In 1964, she played a corrupt mayor in Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim's musical Anyone Can Whistle. It was a disreputable failure that ended with just 12 rehearsals and 9 shows, but it showed that she could summon the right thing for a live musical performance. "I have a small, tall soprano, and they want a Belt," she said in 2009. "So I learned this way of singing."
Ms. Lansbury and Frankie Michaels in Mamm. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, are said to be considering the role. © via Angela Lansbury
Ms. Lansbury is not a coveted protagonist in Mamm, a musical by Jerry Herman based on Patrick Dennis' novel Auntie Mame, which has been adapted into a stage play and film – both starring Rosalind Russell and both with great success.
Ms. Russell didn't want to play Mamm again. Mary Martin was selected, but opted out. More than a dozen actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, are said to be considered. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition in front of the show's creative and financial head.
In a cover article for Life magazine about the show and her role in it, she recalled that men in sunglasses interrupted her several times, forcing her to sing the song again. "Then they said, 'Goodbye, thank you.'" That's all," she said.
Back home in Malibu, California, she was with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, as she waited months for a call from East. Finally, she flew to New York to confront the producer.
"I'm going back to California," she recalled to them, "unless you tell me — let's face it, I'm exhausted — now, agree or not, that's the end." That afternoon, she got a formal consent.
Her performance made her finally a real star. The play opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and columnist Rex Reed reported in The New York Times that on the night of his arrival, "when people got tired of whistling and thunderous applause, they stood up and screamed from their newly renovated seats in the winter garden." He likened Ms. Lansbury to "a happy caterpillar who has turned into a gold-rimmed butterfly after years of endless roles such as a baggy face with a thumb pointed at Hollywood." ”
▲ Ms. Lancebury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorable mention from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating "some of the most memorable characters in cinema" and "inspiring generations of actors." © Sam Falk/The New York Times
To Ms. Lancebury's disappointment, however, Lucille Ball was chosen as the film version of "Mamm", but it was not successful.
Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony Award for Best Actress for her role as 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in "Dear World," an adaptation of the 1969 musical "The Madwoman of Chaillot." The show itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. But for a while, it maintained the honor of the highest ticket price on Broadway: the best seat was $12.50 (equivalent to $105 today, about 753 yuan).
She then returned to Hollywood to play an aging German aristocrat in Something for Everyone (1970), a rare film work by Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and she also played a witch in the Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).
But it was a turbulent time for her and her family. Their house in Malibu was destroyed in a bushfire. Her son and daughter are using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California and head to the shores of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse designs.
It was the refuge they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children also overcame the drug problem. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, whose work included several episodes of The Female Writer and Murder; Deirdre eventually married restaurateur Enzo Battarra and became his business partner.
▲ Collaboration with Len Cariou in Sweeney Todd. Ms. Lansbury is known for her role as Mrs. Lovett, a baker. Lovett) and won a Tony Award. © Martha Swope
Over the next decade, Ms. Lansbury worked primarily on stage in London and New York. In 1974, she played Mama Rose in the London re-enactment of Gypsy and won her third Tony Award on Broadway. She is known for her role as Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler's Sweeney Todd. Lovett) won another Tony Award, starring Len Cariou, which opened in March 1979 and ran 557 performances.
Success on the London stage drew a circle for Ms. Lansbury.
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on October 16, 1925, and grew up in upper-middle-class comforts, her mother, Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and her father, Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician, was Labour leader George Lansbury Lansbury). Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9 years old; Her grandfather's death five years later, coinciding with the outbreak of World War II, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half-sister and twin brother.
"We left everything behind," Ms. Lansbury recalls. "All of a sudden, we weren't there."
Ms. Lansbury played mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in the hugely successful CBS series "Murder, She Wrote." © CBS
Unexpected popularity
Despite her great success on stage, Ms. Lansbury really became a household name as the mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher in the 1984 CBS series Murder, She Wrote.
It is widely believed that the show's protagonist is a cycling widow who lives in a small Maine town and has little chance of competing with sexier lead characters like NBC's action-crime drama Knight Rider. The conventional wisdom is that advertisers don't go after the older audience the show is likely to attract.
"We received condolences even before it started," recalled Richard Levinson, one of the show's creators. "At best, we're hoping for a small success."
Instead, the show was a huge success. In its second season, it surpassed Steven Spielberg's highly anticipated anthology series Amazing Stories, which had more than 2 million viewers a week and continued until 1996.
"What attracted me to Jessica Fletcher," Ms. Lancebury said in an interview with The New York Times early in the show's second season, "is that I can do what I do best, and it's something I rarely get the chance to play — a sincere, unpretentious woman."
She was nominated for 12 consecutive Emmys for her role as Jessica Fletcher, but never won.
Ms. Lansbury is still active on television (she replayed her signature role in four television-produced films The Writer and Murder) and in films, notably the Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast (1991), in which she performed her role as the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. Potts) voiced. There are many more Broadway shows. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacement surgery allowed her to be off the stage for long.
In 2007, she co-starred with Marian Seldes in Terrence McNally's comedy Deuce and played the eccentric psychic Mrs. Arcati in the 2009 re-enactment of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, earning her fifth Tony Award – behind Odella Smith. Audra McDonald and Julie Harris each receive six awards (including Ms. Harris' Lifetime Achievement Award). Later that year, Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her role as Armfeldt in a re-enactment of the Sondheim musical A Little Night Music.
While she never won an Oscar or Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorable mention from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating "some of the most memorable characters in cinema" and "inspiring generations of actors." A year later, she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II.
Ms. Lansbury and her husband, Peter Shaw. They married in 1949. © via Angela Lansbury
Ms. Angela Lansbury passed away at her home in Los Angeles on October 11, 2022. He was 96 years old.
Her husband, Mr. Xiao, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to American actor Richard Cromwell ended in divorce less than a year. In addition to her sons Anthony and David, daughter Deirdre, Ms. Lansbury has a brother, Edgar, three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.
While many older actresses complain about the lack of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacks work and rarely refuses.
She did choose to pass up the opportunity to return to Broadway in 2017-18 to reenact "The Chalk Garden," saying she decided to spend more time with her family than facing a long, lonely life in New York. But other good characters continue to attract her attention, including the rich, domineering Aunt March in the BBC miniseries "Little Women" and the good woman selling magic balloons in the movie "Mary Poppins Returns 2." Both were released in 2018.
"I don't really know how to relax to the point where I can stop," she told CBS' Katie Couric in 2009. "So, when something comes out and comes out in front of me, I think 'oops, I can do something fun,' or 'I think I can bring something to it,' I do it."
▲ Ms. Lansbury in 2009. "I don't really know how to relax to the point where I can stop," she said that year. © Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times
But, she adds, after all these years, she's still thinking about one thing: "I want to make a great movie before I leave." I don't know what it will be, but I think somewhere there will be one. ”
A dusty 12-year-old interview "The Last Words"
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▲ In 2010, The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury to discuss her life and accomplishments on stage and screen. She spoke to us and said that interviews could only be published after her death. © Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
(End)
原文：Angela Lansbury, Star of Film, Stage and ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 96
By Daniel Lewis
Published: nytimes.com
Translated by Lin Xi
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