THE GRAND DAME (REMEMBERING ANGELA LANSBURY)

A three time Oscar nominee, five times Tony Award winner, an 18 time Emmy nominee, a 15 time Golden Globe nominee and winner and a Grammy nominee, Angela Lansbury had a remarkable career.

Best known for playing the sleuth Jessica Fletcher in 12 seasons of CBS's 'Murder She Wrote,' she worked with legendary directors like George Cukor, Frank Capra, Cecil B De Mille, Edward Dmytryk, Martin Ritt, John Frankenheimer and Neil Jordan.

She also shared the screen with Ingrid Bergman, Elizabeth Taylor, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, Tony Curtis, Danny Kaye, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles, Warren Beatty, Jane Fonda, Peter Sellers, Peter Ustinov, Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Stephen Rea, Emma Thompson, Colin Firth, Jim Carrey and Emily Blunt.

Born in Regent's Park in London in 1925, her mother was the Belfast-born West End actress Moyna Magill and her father wasthe English timber merchant Edgar Lansbury who was a Communist.

She had an older half sister Isolde who was born during Moyna's previous marriage to the writer and director Reginald Denham and two younger twin brothers, Bruce and Edgar.

Raised in the London borough of Poplar, where her father served as the Mayor for a time, the familt moved to Mill Hill.

At the age of nine, she lost her father to stomach cancer and would later recall that as a result of his death, she retreated into acting as a way of coping with the trauma.

Struggling financially, Moyna got engaged to a Scottish colonel Leckie Forbes and the family moved into his house in Hampstead.

Angela developed a keen interest from the age of 10 in literature, theatre and going to the cinema.

After briefly studying music at the Ritman School of Dancing, Angela began learnng acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington.

She made her stage debut as a lady in waiting in a production of Maxwell Anderson's 'Mary of Scotland'.

With Britain immersed in the Second World War and London being targeted by Nazi warplanes during the Blitz, Moyna decided to take Angela, Bruce and Edgar to North America for their own safety.

Isolde, who married the young, up and coming actor Peter Ustinov, remained in London.

Her mother secured a job supervising 60 British children who were being evacuated to Montreal on an Atlantic crossing on the Duchess of Atholl.

On their arrival, the family headed by train to New York where a Wall Street businessman Charles T Smith took them under his wing - settling in the hamlet of Mahopac.

Angela also landed a scholarship with the American Theater Wing and began studying at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio in New York City where she honed her acting with appearances in productions of William Congreve's 'The Way of the World' and Oscar Wilde's 'Lady Windermere's Fan'.

After she graduated in 1942, she moved to Greenwich Village and embarked on her professional acting career.

When her mum secured a role in a touring production of Noel Coward's 'Toboght at 8.30' across Canada, Angela joined her in Montreal landing work in a nightclub act - singing Noel Coward songs.

When Moyna moved to LA to try and build a career in Hollywood, Angela went too and they both secured jobs at the Bullocks Whilshire Department Store, with Angela warning $28 a week.

While Moyna was sacked, Angela remained and befriended a group of gay men and got to know the city's underground gay scene.

At a party hosted by Moyna, Angels met the English playwright and screenwriter John van Druten who had crafted a script of Patrick Hamilton's 'Gaslight' for MGM with Walter Reich and John L Balderston.

George Cukor was attached as the director and it was Van Druten who recommended Angela for the role of the crafty Cockney maid in the Victorian London thriller.

Lansbury got the part as Nancy Oliver and found herself acting opposite Ungrid Bergman, Charles Boyer and Joseph Cotten.

But because she was 17, she had to be accompanied by a social worker on set and also she had to quickly acquire an agent, Earl Kramer who signed her to a seven year contract with the studio on a $500 a week salary

Cukor's 1944 film got mixed reviews but critics praised Lansbury for her performance which drew Oscar buzz that resulted in her landing a Best Supporting Actress nomination.

With Hollywood entranced by the notion of an unknown actor landing an Oscar nomination in her debut role, her next role was as Edwina, the older sister of Elizabeth Taylor's aspiring jockey Velvet Brown in Clarence Brown's hit 1944 sports tearjerker 'National Velvet' with Mickey Rooney.

The film marked the start of a lifelong friendship with Taylor.

In 1945, she appeared as the singer Sibyl Vain in director Albert Lewin's adaptation of Oscar Wilde's 'The Picture of Dorian Gray' with George Sanders, Donna Reed and Peter Lawford.

It would earn her second Best Supporting Actress nomination at the Oscars and a Golden Globe win.

Also that year, she married Richard Cromwell, an actor who career had floundered but who found work as a visual artist and decorator.

Richard was gay and had married her in the hope that it would turn him heterosexual.

The marriage crumbled in less than a year with Angela filing for divorce but they would remain lifelong friends.

At the end of 1946, Angela was introduced to a fellow English ex-pat Peter Pullen Shaw who was an actor and had just broken up with Joan Crawford.

They become involved and eventually lived together.

Angela proposed to him but because the Church of England would not marry a divorced woman, they we'd in a Church of Scotland instead in Knightsbridge in London in 1949 instea and honeymooned in France.

Returning to the US, the couple settled in Rustic Canyon near Santa Monica and officially became American citizens in 1951, retaining dual nationality.

Lansbury appeared in 11 movues under her MGM contract following the success of her first three films.

These included George Sidney's 1946 Technicolour musical 'The Harvey Girls' with Judy Garland, Norman Taurog's newspaper drama 'The Hoodlum Saint' with William Powell, Albert Lewin's 1947 drama 'The Private Affairs of Bel Ami' with George Sanders, Victor Saville's 'If Winter Comes' with Deborah Kerr and Walter Pidgeon, Frank Capra's 1948 drama 'State of the Union' with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn and George Sidney's successful version of 'The Three Musketeers' with Gene Kelly, Lana Turner, Van Heflin, June Allyson and Vincent Price.

Not all of these were box office hits or enjoyed good reviews and kept firmly in the rank of B List stars by the studio, George Cukor felt she was badly treated by MGM who had miscast her in several roles.

She played Semadar in Cecil B De Mille's 1949 epic 'Sansom and Delilah' with Victor Mature, Hedy Lamarr and George Sanders which earned rave reviews and scored a box office hit for Paramount.

In 1950, though Lansbury got her first taste of working on TV with an appearance on NBC's drama anthology 'Robert Montgomery Presents' which would classic plays or real life events like the Hindenburg Disaster and try to turn them into prestige one-off studio dramas.

During the decade, she would appear in similar shows such as CBS's 'Lux Video Theatre,''The Ford Theatre,' 'Schlitz Playhouse of the Stars,' 'General Electric True Theatre,' 'Four Star Playhouse' and 'Stage 7,' NBC's 'The Revlon Mirror Theatre,' 'Fireside Theatre' and 'Screen Directors Playhouse' and on the network's variety show 'Your Show of Shows' with Sid Caesar, the Henry Fonda hosted syndicated anthology show 'The Star and The Story' and another syndicated drama anthology show 'Celebrity Playhouse'.

There was a role as a nasty maid in John Sturges' 1951 film noir 'Kind Lady' with Ethel Barrymore and Keenan Wynn but underperformed at the box office.

Edward Dmytryk directed her in 1952 in the Technicolour adventure 'Mutiny' which met with mixed reviews.

In Don Weis' 1953 musical comedy 'Remains To Be Seen,' she starred alongside June Allyson and Van Johnson in a movie that failed to capture audiences' imagination.

Lansbury was getting frustrated by the studios' tendency to cast her as an older woman and would later remark: "Hollywood made me old before my time".

She took on minor roles in films like Paul Guilfoyle's 1954 film noir 'A Life At Stake' with Keith Andes, Joseph H Lewis' 1955 Western 'A Lawless Stret' with Randolph Scott and H Bruce Humberstone's swashbuckling adventure 'The Purple Mask' with Tony Curtis.

Angela played a Princess in Melvin Frank and Norman Panama's 1956 comedy 'The Court Jester' with Danny Kaye and Basil Rathbone which bombed at the box office but then grew in popularity after it was screened on TV.

She joined Raymond Burr in Peter Godfrey's 1956 film noir 'Please Murder Me' playing a woman who kills her husband and joined Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Orson Welles and Lee Remick in Martin Ritt's hit adaptation of William Faulkner's 'The Long Hot Summer'.

In 1957, Angela appeared on Broadway in an English language version of Georges Feydeau and Maurice Desvaillieres' comedy 'Hotel Paradiso'.

1958 saw her appear alongside Rex Harrison, Kay Kendall and Sandra Dee in Vincente Minnelli's 'The Reluctant Debutante' which was made in Paris and was a minor hit.

She returned to Broadway in 1960 to appear in English playwright Shelagh Delaney's 'A Taste of Honey' with Joan Plowright, Nigel Davenport and Billy Dee Williams - an acclaimed tale of a working class white girl who gets involved with a black sailor.

The show ran for a year.

That year she also had a sympathetic re in Delbert Mann's drama 'The Dark At The Top of The Stairs' as a widow and hair salon owner with Robert Preston, Dorothy McGuire and Shirley Knight.

John Frankenheimer cast her as manipulative mother in the 1962 drama 'All Fall Down' with Warren Beatty, Eva Marie Saint and Karl Malden which earned her positive reviews - even if the film didn't.

Her second collaboration with Frankenheimer that year was in the cult thriller 'The Manchurian Candidate' for which she picked up her third Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination.

Also starring Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey and Janet Leigh, she played the manipulative wife of a US Senator in a role which won her Golden Globe and National Board of Review awards.

She would regret making Robert Stevens'1963 romantic drama 'In the Cool of the Day' in which she played Peter Finch's wife alongside a cast that included Jane Fonda and Nigel Davenport - denouncing the script as woeful.

Jane Fonda agreed, saying it was the worst film she had also made.

In 1963, she guested on an episode of NBC's medical drama 'The Eleventh Hour' and followed that up with an appearance two years later in an episode of NBC's espionage series 'The Man from U.N.C.L.E.' with Robert Vaughn and David McCallum.

In 1964, she landed her first role in a Stephen Sondheim musical on Broadway in 'Anyone Can Whistle' with Lee Remick - although she had some reservations about its absurdist script.

Taking on the role of Mayoress Cora Hoover, it was a troubled production that was shredded by the critics and closed after nine performances and twelve previews, undergoing multiple revisions.

George Roy Hill directed her, Peter Sellers and Tom Bosley in the critically acclaimed 1964 comedy 'The World of Henry Orient'.

She also teamed up again with Delbert Mann in the 1965 comedy 'Dear Heart' with Glenn Ford and Geraldine Page which got mixed reviews.

Angela played the mother of Jean Harlow in Gordon Douglas' 1965 biopic 'Harlow' with Carroll Baker, Red Buttons, Martin Balsam and Leslie Nielsen which did decent business in cinemas.

There was a guest role in 1965 in an episode of CBS's legal drama 'The Trials of O'Brien' with Peter Falk and Elaine Stritch.

Angela would win a second Tony for Best Lead Actress in a Musical when she took on the role on Broadway of Mame Dennis in Jerry Herman's 'Mame' in which she played an eccentric bohemian during the Great Depression.

Lansbury would take on the role again in a revival in 1983.

She teamed up again with Herman to great success in 1969, picking up a third Tony award for her lead performance as a Countess in 'Dear World' which co-starred the Irish actor Milo O'Shea and it ran for 136 performances despite receiving some hostile reviews from critics.

Fiercely proud of her Irish roots, Lansbury formally became an Irish citizen in 1970 - moving to Co Cork from California.

There was another musical stage role as the wife of a bigoted sheriff in the Jim Crow era in Bob Merrill and Jule Styne's 'Prettybelle' in 1971 which was due to open on Broadway after previews in Boston but never made it.

Dealing with racism and sex, the provocative nature of the musical triggered a negative reaction from Boston audiences who did not like its Avant Garde staging and the critics were even harsher.

Lansbury instead appeared on London's West End in a 1972 Peter Hall production of Edward Albee's two hander 'All Over' for the Royal Shakespeare Company where she was joined by Peggy Ashcroft, Sheila Hancock, playing the mistress of a man nearing death.

This was followed by two year run on the West End and Broadway in a production of Stephen Sondheim's 'Gypsy' which her brother Edgar co-produced and which earned her another Tony after it transferred to New York.

Angela returned to London in 1975 to play Gertrude in 'Hamlet' in a National Theatre production with Albert Finney in the lead role which got widely different responses from the critics.

After a ten year break for TV work, Lansbury narrated in 1975 a stop motion animation 'The First Christmas' for NBC which was a small screen hit about orphans staging a Festive pageant.

Lansbury replaced Constance Towers for three weeks in a Broadway revival of 'The King and I' in 1978 to give the actress playing Anna a break from its successful run.

In 1979, she earned acclaim for her performance on Broadway as the meat pie shop owner Nellie Lovett in Stephen Sondheim's musical 'Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street' winning a Tony for Best Actress in a Musical and going on tour with it across the United States.

PBS broadcast the hit show on the small screen in 1982.

For much of the 1970s her movie career stuttered, with Lansbury famously passing on the lead role in Robert Aldrich's acclaimed 1968 movie 'The Killing of Sister George' and also the part of Nurse Ratched on Milos Forman's 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest' which would lead to Louise Fletcher capturing the Best Actress Oscar and Jack Nicholson winning Best Actor.

Her decision to opt instead for roles in Harold Prince's derided 1970 black comedy 'Something for Everyone' with Michael York was a setback.

However she scored a critical and commercial success in 1971 for the Robert Stevenson directed Disney film 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' with David Tomlinson which became a family classic.

She made only two other movies that decade.

The first was john Guillermin's 1978 Agatha Christie murder mystery 'Death on the Nile' where she played the romance novelist Salome Otterbourne alongside Peter Ustinov's Hercule Poirot, landing a BAFTA Best Supporting Actress nomination.

The star studded adventure which featured Bette Davis, Maggie Smith, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Jack Warden, George Kennedy and Olivia Hussey was a hit with audiences and drew mostly positive reviews.

A year later, Angela was an elderly governess in Anthony Paige's remake of 'The Lady Vanishes' with Elliot Gould and Cybill Shepherd in a movie which drew unfavourable comparisons to Alfred Hitchcock's 1938 classic and didn't set the box office alight.

She returned to the world of Agatha Christie in her next big screen outing in 1980, playing Miss Marple in Guy Hamilton's 'The Mirror Crack'd' among a star studded cast that included Rock Hudson, Tony Curtis, Geraldine Chaplin, Kim Novak, Edward Fox and her old friend Elizabeth Taylor.

The film performed disappointingly at the box office and Lansbury abandoned plans to reprise the role of Miss Marple in future movies.

There was an Emmy nomination for her performance as Gertrude Vanderbilt in the 1982 biographical miniseries 'Little Gloria.. Happy At Last' which aired on NBC with a cast that included Lucy Gutteridge, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Martin Balsam, Christopher Plummer, Barnard Hughes and Glynis Johns.

She was among the voice cast in Arthur Rankin Jr and Jules Bass' 1982 American Japanese animated fantasy 'The Last Unicorn,' playing a witch among a cast that included Jeff Bridges, Alan Arkin, Mia Farrow and Christopher Lee which performed modestly at the box office despite enthusiastic reviews.

In 1983, she joined Lee Remick in a CBS TV movie 'The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story' which earned them both good reviews and became a bit of a regular Festive favourite on US TV schedules during the 1980s.

She was the nursemaid Ruth in Wilford Leach's critically well received 1983 movie of Gilbert and Sullivan's 'The Pirates of Penzance' with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt.

However the film was controversial because it was intended by Universal Pictures as a simultaneous release on cable, prompting cinema owners to boycott its theatrical release.

There was a role as the US athlete Robert Garrett's mother in the two-part 1984 NBC miniseries 'The First Olympics: Athens 1896' with David Caruso, Virginia McKenna and David Ogden Stiers.

Lansbury acted opposite Laurence Olivier and Hildegard Neil in a BBC2 production of Jerome Chodorov and Norman Panama's Broadway play 'A Talent for Murder' in a role as a crime author that seemed to anticipate her most successful TV part in 'Murder She Wrote'.

Directed by Alvin Rakoff, the murder mystery aired on Showtime in the US.

There was an elderly aunt role opposite Phoebe Cates on ABC's 1984 miniseries of Shirley Conran's bonkbuster 'Lace' with Brooke Adams, Anthony Higgins, Honor Blackman and Anthony Quayle which was a ratings success.

Lansbury also turned in a memorable big screen performance in Irish director Neil Jordan's acclaimed 1984 Gothic tale 'A Company of Wolves' with Micha Bergese, David Warner and Stephen Rea.

A Freudian fairytale, the British indie movie earned rave reviews on both sides of the Atlantic but only just made its investment back.

1984 would also see Lansbury score her greatest small screen success as the crime writer turned sleuth Jessica Fletcher in CBS's 'Murder She Wrote'.

A huge ratings hit in the US and around the world, it ran for 284 episodes between 1984 and 1996 and she even appeared in a crossover with Tom Selleck's hit show 'Magnum PI'.

Lansbury would become an executive producer on the show in its last five years - a decision which would prove very lucrative.

However she was also passionate about her most famous role, arguing: "I honestly feel that 'Murder, She Wrote' stands alone, as many of the other great shows of the past 35, 40 years do.

"It stands alone and it's still on. It's still all over the world 'Murder, She Wrote,' Jessica Fletcher and 'Murder, She Wrote'."

She would four Golden Globes for playing Jessica Fletcher and Screens Actors Guild and Emmy nominations.

There would also be TV movie versions in 1997, 2000, 2001 and 2003 that drew decent ratings.

Jessica Fletcher's last adventure 'The Celtic Riddle' saw her film in her beloved Ireland with a cast that included Fionnula Flanagan, Andrew Connolly, Geraldine Hughes and Sean Lawlor.

During the 1980s there would be appearances in miniseries like 'Sidney Sheldon's Rage of Angels: The Story Continues,' NBC's TV movie 'Shootdown' about mother of a man killed when a Korean airlines plane was shot down by the Soviet Union and ABC's Hallmark Hall of Fame tale 'The Shell Seekers'.

In 1991, Lansbury provided the voice of Mrs Potts in Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise's groundbreaking Disney feature 'Beauty and the Beast' which was the first animated movie to be nominated for Best Picture.

The film was a monster box office hit with Lansbury rubbing shoulders with a cast that included Paige O'Hara, Robby Benson, Richard White, Jerry Orbach and David Ogden Stiers.

She reprised the role in a 1997 direct to video spin-off 'Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas' and in the 2001 direct to video release 'Mickey's Magical Christmas: Snowed in at the House of Mouse'.

As the video games industry boomed, she also lent her voice to two Beauty and the Beast' games in 2000 and 2006.

There was also a dual role as the narrator and a Dowager Empress in the 1997 Irish American Sullivan Bluth Studios' animated feature 'Anastasia' whose voice cast included Meg Ryan, John Cusack, Kelsey Grammar, Christopher Lloyd, Bernadette Peters and Hank Azaria.

Despite Disney's attempts to scupper its success by pitching some of its biggest releases against it, 'Anastasia' performed well at the box office and earned good reviews

On the small screen in the 1990s while she continued to enjoy success with 'Murder She Wrote,' there were also roles as Ada Harris in a TV movie of 'Mrs 'Arris Goes To Paris' with Diana Rigg and Omar Sharif,in the title role of CBS's 'Mrs Santa Claus' with Charles Durning and another TV movie on the network of 'The Unexpected Mrs Polifax'.

In 2002, she appeared in an episode of CBS's fantasy drama 'Touched By An Angel' with Roma Downey and two years later on a Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movie of Colm Toibin's acclaimed Irish AIDS drama 'The Blackwater Lightship' with Brian F O'Byrne, Gina McKee, Dianne Wiest and Sam Robards.

In 2005, there were appearances on NBC as the same character Eleanor Duvall, the mother of a rapist, in two 'Law and Order' spin-off shows 'Special Victims Unit' and 'Trial by Jury'.

In 2007, Lansbury returned to Broadway and earned praise for her performance as a former tennis pro in Terence McNally's play 'Deuce'.

A revival on Broadway in 2009 of Noel Coward's 'Blithe Spirit' with Rupert Everett earned her more praise for her depiction of the eccentric medium, Madam Arcati - even if critics found the production to be less impressive.

She had a second bite at the role on London's West End in 2014, acting opposite Charles Edwards and won Best Supporting Actress at the Olivier Awards.

Lansbury secured a Tony nomination for her performance in a 2009 Broadway revival of Stephen Sondheim's 'A Little Night Music' with Catherine Zeta Jones.

In the 2000s, she appeared on the big screen as herself in Disney's experimental concert film 'Fantasia 2000' along with Steve Martin, Bette Midler, Quincy Jones and James Earl Jones.

However in 2005, she turned in a delightful comedy performance as an overbearing, snobby elderly aunt in the Emma Thompson scripted and Kirk Jones directed hit family film 'Nanny McPhee' with Thompson, Colin Firth, Kelly Macdonald, Celia Imrie, Imelda Staunton and Derek Jacobi.

There was also a voice role in the children's film 'Heidi 4 Paws' with Stephen Rea and Steve Guttenburg.

In 2011, she appeared as an elderly restaurant owner Selma Van Gundy in Mark Waters' hit family comedy 'Mr Popper's Penguins' with Jim Carrey, Carla Gugino, Madeline Carroll, Philip Baker Hall, Dominic Chianese and Jeffrey Tambor.

There were well received performances on Broadway in 2012 productions of Gore Vidal's politics play 'The Best Man' with James Earl Jones, John Laroquette, Michael McKean and Candice Bergen and as Miss Daisy on a 2013 Australian touring production of Alfred Uhry's 'Driving Miss Daisy' with James Earl Jones.

The show was captured for broadcast in cinema across the UK and US before winding up on PBS.

She took part in a 2017 reading of Enid Bagnold's 'The Chalk Garden,' playing Mrs St Maugham at New York's Hunter College before making her final Broadway production appearance as Lady Bracknell in 'The Importance of Being Earnest' in 2019.

Lansbury's last TV appearance was as Aunt March in Heidi Thomas' 2017 adaptation of 'Little Women' on BBC1 with Emily Watson, Maya Hawke and Michael Gambon.

There was a voice role in the English language version of Manuel Scilia's animated film 'Justin and the Knights of Valour' with Freddie Highmore, Antonio Banderas, Charles Dance, Alfred Molina and Julie Walters and Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney's 2018 animated version of Dr Seuss' 'The Grinch' with Benedict Cumberbatch and Kenan Thompson.

There was a touching cameo as a Balloon Lady in Rob Marshall's hit 2018 sequel 'Mary Poppins Returns' with Emily Blunt, Lin Manuel Miranda, Ben Whishaw, Emily Mortimer, Julie Walters, Colin Firth, David Warner, Jim Norton, Meryl Streep and Dick Van Dyke.

Angela teamed up with Dick Van Dyke in her last starring role in Tim Janis' 2018 fantasy drama 'Buttons: A Christmas Tale' with Ioan Gruffudd, Roma Downey, Jane Seymour and Kate Winslet and Robert Redford as narrators.

There is a wonderful symmetry about the fact that Lansbury's last screen appearance will be as herself in Rian Johnson's 'Knives Out' sequel 'Glass Onion' on Netflix.

It seems fitting for an actress who became synonymous with the whodunnit.

It also seems perfect for an actress who loved her craft to be in a star studded whodunnit.

Lansbury once said: "Bringing humour and bringing happiness and joy to an audience is a wonderful opportunity, believe me."

It's an opportunity she grabbed with both hands and amused millions.

(Angela Lansbury passed away at the age of 96 on October 11, 2022)

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THE GRAND DAME (REMEMBERING ANGELA LANSBURY)

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