Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE is a British-American-Irish actress. Her career has spanned almost eight decades, much of it in the United States. She gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame. She achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote.
About Angela Lansbury in brief
Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE is a British-American-Irish actress. Her career has spanned almost eight decades, much of it in the United States. She is recognized as the earliest surviving Academy Award nominee and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Lansbury gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame, which earned her a range of awards and established her as a gay icon. She achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons until 1996. She has received an Honorary Oscar and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Her father was the wealthy English timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar. Her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader and anti-war activist George Lansbury. Her mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna MacGill, who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films. Her half-sister was Isolde, who was the daughter of Moyna’s previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham.
She was born in Regent’s Park, Central London, to an upper-middle-class family. When she was nine, her father died from stomach cancer; she retreated into playing characters as a coping mechanism. She considered herself largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre and cinema and became a self-professed movie maniac. When her mother died, she became engaged to a Scottish colonel, Fergus Leckie Forbes, and moved into his house in Hampstead. She later married the Scottish colonel and moved to County Cork, Ireland, where she lived with him and his family until her death in 1998. She had two children, Bruce and Edgar, with whom she had a son, Peter Shaw, and daughter-in-law, Emma Shaw. She also had a step-son, David Shaw, who is now married to actor David Walliams, and has a daughter, Victoria Shaw. Her husband Peter Shaw is the co-founder of Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter, and was its executive producer for the final four seasons of the series. In 2010, she was awarded a knighthood for services to television and the arts. In 2012, she received a CBE forservices to the theatre and film, and in 2013 she was knighted by the Queen for her services to the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In 2013 she received the OBE for her role in The King and I, as well as numerous other honours and awards.
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This page is based on the article Angela Lansbury published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 09, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
