Actress Angela Lansbury

The one and only. :-D

Angela Lansbury is a transatlantic institution thanks to her work in film, stage and television.  She first became famous in the forties in two classic movies set in Victorian London - Gaslight, the thriller based on the play of the same name, in which she played a Cockney housekeeper, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, a based on the Oscar Wilde novel of that title, in which she played Sibyl, a saloon singer in love with the title character.  Dorian, of course, stays the same even as his picture gets older.

It was also at this time that the British-born Ms. Lansbury starred in the equestrian drama National Velvet, opposite Elizabeth Taylor.

Angela Lansbury showed a different side to her acting ability as the evil Eleanor Iselin in the 1962 political noir thriller The Manchurian Candidate.  Eleanor Iselin is a scheming opportunist who is the brains behind her demagogic husband's political career.  But we always loved Angela Lansbury for her more lovable side, and so it was no surprise that she would be a huge success in 1966 in the title role of Mame, the Broadway musical based on the movie  Auntie Mame, which had starred Rosalind Russell as a fun-living aunt who takes her nephew on whirlwind adventures across the world.  Mame would produce the time-honored Christmas song "We Need a Little Christmas."

The good news for people who missed the original production of Mame was that it was made into a movie in 1974.  The bad news is that Lucille Ball, not Angela Lansbury, was cast in the lead role.  The verdict was unanimous - no Angela, no Mame, no movie.

Her performance as Agatha Christie's detective character Miss Marple in the 1980 movie The Mirror Crack'd '(re-uniting her with Elizabeth Taylor) led to her most famous television role ever - murder-mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher in "Murder, She Wrote."  For twelve years, from 1984 to 1996, Jessica Fletcher would use her skills as a writer to solve murder cases.  Though derided by some as a TV show for elderly people, it was in fact a hit with young people - especially Generation Xers who may have remembered her from the 1971 Disney movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks about a kindly witch who uses her powers to fight the Nazis.  Either way, "Murder She Wrote" would earn Ms. Lansbury new generations of fans.  So would the 1996 TV movie musical Mrs. Santa Claus, with our heroine in the title role.   

A British subject who holds dual citizenship as an American citizen, Angela Lansbury - who has remained active as an actress since 1996 (including a small role in Mary Poppins Returns) - is one of the most beloved entertainers alive today.  She just turned 94 in October 2019. :-)