Angela Lansbury was born in London on October 16, 1925. She would have turned 101 today. She died at her Los Angeles home on October 11, 2022, at 96, just five days before her 97th birthday, according to UPI.
Most fans picture her in Cabot Cove. Yet by the time Murder, She Wrote premiered in 1984, she already had four decades of film and Broadway work behind her. In the middle of those decades, she nearly lost her two teenagers. One of them had drifted into a crowd around Charles Manson, and Lansbury gave up her Hollywood life to get her back.
How Did A Teenage Maid Become An Oscar Nominee?
She and her mother left Britain in 1940, during the Battle of Britain. Her mother, the actress Moyna Macgill, had been a leading lady on the British stage. According to NPR, Lansbury’s first screen role came at 17, as the housemaid Nancy in George Cukor’s Gaslight. That part earned her an Academy Award nomination, as PBS also noted.
Two more nominations followed, for The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate. In the latter she played a chilling political mother. She once summed up her early casting plainly: “I was never going to get to play the girl next door,” NPR recalled.
Off screen, she married Peter Shaw, her husband of 53 years, as her family noted in the statement UPI published. Together they raised Anthony and Deirdre in Southern California.
Where Did Her Career Go After Hollywood?
Her first starring role on Broadway came in Mame in 1966, when she was 40. It won her the first of five Tony Awards. Later wins came for Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and Blithe Spirit. She added a special Tony for lifetime achievement in 2022. She also starred as the apprentice witch Eglantine Price in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks in 1971.
Her younger brother, producer Edgar Lansbury, also made his career in the theater.
Murder, She Wrote ran on CBS from 1984 to 1996, according to UPI. NPR noted that she called herself “happily trapped” as Jessica Fletcher. “Being Jessica was second nature to me because she embodied all of the qualities that I like about women,” she said.
Many younger fans know her best for a single song. In 1991 she voiced Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast and sang its title ballad. According to Disney, producer Don Hahn recalled that she recorded it with a live orchestra in just one take. Disney’s D23 fan club has shared the same story. She had arrived late after a travel delay and walked straight into the booth.
Her last Disney appearance came in 2018, as the Balloon Lady in Mary Poppins Returns. She was 93 when the film opened, still working nearly 75 years after Gaslight. None of that run was guaranteed. In the late 1960s, she had stepped away from work entirely.
What Was Happening At Home In The Late 1960s?
Angela Lansbury faced a crisis no role could prepare her for. Her teenage children had fallen in with a hard crowd in Los Angeles, and drugs had taken hold of both of them. “It started with cannabis but moved on to heroin,” she told the Daily Mail in a 2014 interview, recalled by The A.V. Club.
The danger went beyond drugs. “There were factions up in the hills above Malibu that were dedicated to deadly pursuits,” she said. “It pains me to say it but, at one stage, Deidre was in with a crowd led by Charles Manson.”
“She was one of many youngsters who knew him, and they were fascinated,” Lansbury said. “He was an extraordinary character, charismatic in many ways, no question about it.”
Deirdre never formally joined the Manson Family. Manson biographer Jeff Guinn told People in 2017 that she “never formally joined” the group, as Snopes later reported. What Manson wanted from her was something in her purse.
How Did Angela Lansbury Get Her Daughter Back?
Guinn said Deirdre was “one of a number of impressionable young people who had her parents’ credit cards.” Lansbury and Peter Shaw found out about the spending and the drugs, and they cut off her cards, The A.V. Club reported. Guinn said Manson then moved on to other young people.
The family’s Malibu house also burned. Lansbury later said “a fire destroyed our home in Malibu,” according to IrishCentral, and PBS also tied the move to that fire. In 1970 she took Peter and the children to County Cork, Ireland. “I was drawn to Ireland because it was the birthplace of my mother,” she said, according to Uproxx. It was “somewhere my children wouldn’t be exposed to any more bad influences.”
She stopped working to see it through. “So I refused all work for a year and simply kept house,” she said. A doctor prescribed methadone, “which helped with the withdrawal symptoms as Anthony and Deidre were weaned off hard drugs.”
It worked. Lansbury said Anthony “pulled right out of his bad habits quite quickly,” Snopes reported, and Deirdre took a little longer. Deirdre later married, and by 2014 she and her husband were running an Italian restaurant in Los Angeles. Anthony Shaw went on to direct dozens of episodes of Murder, She Wrote for his mother. Decades later she still kept a house in Cork, and she held Irish citizenship, IrishCentral and PBS reported.
“Certainly, I have no doubt we would have lost one or both of our two if they hadn’t been removed to a completely different milieu, the simplicity of life in Ireland,” she said. “We were so very, very lucky we spotted what was happening just in time.”
