For those who grew up in the 1970s and early 1980s, Angela Lansbury will always be that wonderful novice witch who bought her broomstick and haunting books through the mail and had to take in three London children against her will during World War II. evacuated by bombing. Then, after the necessary adaptation process, the children and the amateur witch went on wonderful adventures and defeated the Nazis in Robert Stevenson’s 1971 film.
The film had something to do with the real life of the actress who, born in London in 1925, moved with her family to the United States in 1940 fleeing German bombs. It didn’t take long for Lansbury, who died last night at the age of 96 in Los Angeles, to move to Hollywood to develop her talents as an actress, singer and dancer on the big screen. Skills that came from the family. Her parents and stepfather were also actors and her step-sister had married the famous Peter Ustinov.
Already in the Mecca of cinema, Lansbury carved out a niche for herself as one of those essential secondary actresses after playing the housekeeper in Dying Light (George Cukor, 1944) or participating in The Picture of Dorian Gray (Albert Lewin, 1945). MGM included her on her payroll and other titles came, such as The Three Musketeers (George Sidney, 1948), where she played Queen Anne of Austria or Samson and Delilah (Cecil B. DeMille, 1949).
In the early 1950s, she retired from movies to care for her son. But he came back in the ’60s and combined his film roles with theater. She made a name for herself in the neon lights of Broadway playing the wonderful and crazy Aunt Mame, the one who raised her nephew with the utmost freedom in the twenties, in the musical of the same title. Her role earned her the first of five Tony Awards for her.
During the 1970s, he combined his work in the theater with roles in British and American films. Until in 1978, she participated in Death on the Nile (John Guillermin), a choral film full of stars, adaptation of the novel of the same title by Agatha Christie. The producers of the film understood that Lansbury was the perfect Mrs. Marple and gave her the leading role in another film with similar characteristics, The Broken Mirror (Guy Hamilton, 1980). She was the prelude to the great role of her life: the intelligent Jessica Fletcher.
Fletcher was a famous writer of crime novels, who brilliantly solved the real crimes that assailed her at every turn in Murder, She Wrote, a cult television series that developed in several seasons between 1984 and 1996 and that has been the subject of continuous reruns.
The actress was married twice. She with Richard Cromwell in 1945 from whom she separated the following year. In 1949, she married Peter Shaw, the producer of Murder, She Wrote, with whom she had two children and was together until his death in 2003. Lansbury, who received an honorary Oscar and several Golden Globes, died yesterday in her sleep at his home in Los Angeles. On the 16th of this month she would have turned 97 years old.
