Angela Lansbury

Born in the British capital on October 16, 1925, Angela Brigid Lansbury is the daughter of Irish actress Moyna MacGill , while her father died when she was 9 years old. Her grandfather, George Lansbury, was a leading figure in the Labor Party and became a candidate for Prime Minister. Young Angela studied acting at the Webber Douglas Academy.

The wedding of his half-sister Isolde Denham, who married Peter Ustinov , coincided with the outbreak of World War II. During the invitation, her mother considered whether it was convenient to leave the country, and she finally embarked with Angela and her two twin brothers, Bruce and Edgar, on a ship that was the last one that could leave the country to cross the Atlantic.

After settling for some time in New York, the family ended up in Los Angeles, where Angela and her mother worked as salespeople. The aspiring actress did not miss the opportunity to appear for castings, until she finally made her film debut, with a secondary but outstanding role, in Dying Light , by George Cukor , where she was the flirtatious servant Nancy, along with Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman . She couldn’t get Lansbury off to a better start, as she received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting.

The following year he shot The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945) , where he was a girl about to commit suicide. They nominated her for an Oscar again. Moyna MacGill, her mother, also worked on the tape. Right after she played several of her most prominent characters, such as the queen consort Anne of Austria in The Three Musketeers , the embittered woman in The State of the Union , or the sister of the protagonist in Samson and Delilah .

Married to actor Richard Cromwell ( Jezebel ), they divorced in 1949, to pair up with producer Peter Shaw , with whom she had two children. After giving birth to the first, the later actor and director Anthony Pullen Shaw , the actress decided to put aside the cinema for a bit to dedicate herself to taking care of her. Throughout the 1950s she did little lavishness, though she did leave behind some memorable roles, as Orson Welles’ alcoholic lover in The Long Hot Summer .

She returned in style, in 1962, with one of her best works, in The Messenger of Fear , where she was a possessive mother, a role that earned her her third and last Oscar nomination, although she didn’t take it either. On the Broadway stage, she established herself with the musical “Mame”, for which she won her first Tony, an award that she won four other times, which makes her the only one to have won it so many times along with Julie Harris , who also He has five others and a special one. Another of her big stage hits was the musical “Sweeney Todd,” where she was Mrs. Lovett, who cooked human meat pies.

In cinema, he played films such as The Greatest Story Ever Told , The Faceless Woman , and above all , The Rookie Witch , one of Walt Disney ‘s greatest real-image successes –with some animation .

She was also the grandmother in the terrifying In the company of wolves , by Neil Jordan , and shone especially as a writer of novels with alcohol problems, in Death on the Nile , adaptation of a novel by Agatha Christie . She revisited this author’s universe in The Broken Mirror , where she was Miss Marple, one of her most characteristic characters. No wonder she was cast as the lead in Murder, She Wrote, one of the longest running series in television history, produced by Peter Shaw, her husband. She played Jessica Fletcher, a writer of mystery novels, who solved mysteries along the lines of the works of Agatha Christie, and who was as jinxed as Miss Marple, because wherever she traveled, a crime was committed. She combined her work with some film intervention, for example she gave the voice to Mrs. Potts, the teapot from Beauty and the Beast , where she sang the main theme (in the English version that “you hear a song, which makes sigh…”) that resounds during the dance of the protagonists.

At the end of the 90s, after the end of the series, he decided to dedicate himself above all to teaching his trade, in acting academies. After Shaw’s death, her partner, Angela Lansbury, decided to return to the movies, in titles like The Magical Nanny and Mr. Popper’s Penguins , and she has reprized the character of Jessica Fletcher in several telefilms.