Angela Lansbury, better known as the beloved snoop Jessica Fletcher to fans of the long-running 90’s television series, “Murder She Wrote”, has died at the age of 96 at her home in Los Angeles.
Ms. Lansbury captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as the widowed mystery writer on “Murder, She Wrote.” Her death was announced in a statement by her family.
Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina and longevity.
The English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s spirited Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), an auspicious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”
Born in London, at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and went n to attend New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder. “I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.” In Hollywood she worked alongside the major stars of multiple decades, but she never became a leading lady.
Her performance in the Broadway play “Mame” made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”
