Angela Lansbury carried a powerful dignity with her whenever she graced the stage or screen, even from the very beginning. Lansbury’s very first film performance (1944’s Gaslight) earned her an Oscar nomination at the age of 19; as if to prove this was no fluke, the actress garnered another Oscar nomination (and won a Golden Globe) the very next year for The Portrait of Dorian Gray.
The awards hardly stopped there for Lansbury, who was nominated for a Golden Globe 10 years in a row (out of 15 nominations) and a Primetime Emmy Award 12 years in a row (out of 18 nominations), and won five Tony Awards. Fortuantely, she received her greatly deserved Lifetime Achievement Tony Award this year before she passed away on Oct. 11th at the age of 96, just five days before her 97th birthday. On Lansbury’s 95th birthday, she displayed her usual humility, kindness, and warmth, saying:
NBCUniversal
That same kind sentiment and gratitude was on display for most of her life. Lansbury was a lot of things to a lot of people. Aside from a queen of the stage and lauded onscreen performer, she was a literal Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a gay icon, a loving wife of 53 years (until her husband Peter Shaw’s death), a quietly but intimately religious woman, a social activist, and a mother who was endlessly devoted to her children despite the very rough times in their lives.
She left the world with not only a large and loving family, with three grandchildren and give great-grandchildren, but also an incredible filmography that will forever remain a gift to film and television fans. These are just some of Angela Lansbury’s most beloved performances in film and television.
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9 The Mirror Crack’d
Columbia-Warner
Lansbury leads a truly all-star cast (Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis, Rock Hudson, Geraldine Chaplin, a very young Pierce Brosnan) in the otherwise mediocre 1980 film The Mirror Crack’d. While the film wasn’t exactly critically acclaimed and only made $11 million off its $6 million budget, it is crucially important for Lansbury’s career because it finds her (unbeknownst to Lansbury) essentially auditioning for the role that would bring her into the television sets of millions upon millions of people a few years later in Murder, She Wrote.
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Lansbury does a good job inhabiting the classic Agatha Christie character Miss Marple in this film which has an unfortunately weak script and poor direction. Her Miss Marple (and recent portrayal of another Christie character in Death On the Nile) sealed the deal for her casting in Murder, She Wrote, and provided a great amount of experience as a charming, witty sleuth in advance of her iconic role in that show.
8 A Life at Stake
Filmmakers Releasing OrganizationMonarch Film Corporation
This woefully underrated ’50s film noir was financed and distributed outside the traditional studio system of Hollywood at the time, allowing Lansbury to sink her teeth in a much meatier role than the smaller supporting characters she was consistently cast as in the previous decade with MGM. Lansbury is wonderful in A Life at Stake as the scheming femme fatale Doris Hillman, who begins an affair with a man caught in the midst of her real estate scam. She’s sexy, dangerous, and dominant in this dark independent film.
7 Mrs. Santa Claus
CBS
As a Christian and all-around sweet and kind woman, Lansbury participated in several Christmas movies and projects (Mickey’s Magical Christmas, Buttons: A Christmas Tale, The Grinch, The Gift of Love: A Christmas Story), but her made-for-TV movie Mrs. Santa Claus is probably the greatest and undoubtedly the weirdest. A lavish musical period piece with Emmy nominations for all of its meticulous visuals (hair and makeup, art direction, choreography, costume design), Mrs. Santa Claus featured a 70-years-old Lansbury delivering a spritely, spirited, and superb performance.
Lansbury plays the titular wife of Santa Claus during the early 20th century. Fed up with her bloated husband’s preoccupation with the hustle and bustle of Christmas, Mrs. Claus takes the sleigh out on her own but crash lands in New York. Stranded, she is taken in by a family of Jewish immigrants and begins spreading joy in her community, eventually participating in the women’s suffrage movement and becoming an activist to end child labor. Again, it’s a weird story that unites the Christmas spirit with secular humanism, political action, and women’s rights, and Lansbury sells the whole thing. Plus she sings her heart out in this film’s great soundtrack from the composer of Hello, Dolly!
6 The Company of Wolves
ITC Entertainment
Neil Jordan’s masterful, surreal, Freudian take on the Little Miss RIding Hood story, The Company of Wolves is a gorgeously gothic horror fantasy in which Lansbury shines the most as the grandmother in the woods. With her wise demeanor and deliberate phrasing, she becomes the through line for the film with the stories she tells her grandmother. Her dark warnings combined with maternal affection are strangely memorable, ensuring that Lansbury would become the favorite grandma everyone wished they’d had.
5 Death on the Nile
EMI Distributors
Death on the Nile is the strong and equally star-studded follow-up to the smash-hit success of 1974’s Murder on the Orient Express. This 1978 version of Agatha Christie’s classic stars Peter Ustinov as the famed detective Hercule Poirot alongside Maggie Smith, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow, David Niven, Jack Warden, Jane Birkin, and George Kennedy. While a much smaller supporting role than her Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack’d, Lansbury plays the Christie character Salome Otterbourne and proved for the first time that she perfectly fit in with the atmosphere of an intelligent, light murder mystery.
4 Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Buena Vista Distribution
One of Disney’s underrated ’70s movies, Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a delightful and often surreal hybridization of live-action and animation based on the 1940s children’s books The Magic Bedknob; or, How to Become a Witch in Ten Easy Lessons and Bonfires and Broomsticks by Mary Norton. With Oscar-winning visual effects, the film feels like a much lighter, brighter, and kinder version of Forbidden Games or Pan’s Labyrinth, those films which use elaborate fantasy to sublimate the terrors that children experience in wartime.
Bedknobs and Broomsticks follows a group of children in 1940 while England was deep in the midst of World War II, who are sent to stay in Pepperinge Eye under the care of Miss Price (a matriarchal, grand Lansbury in a perfect performance), who turns out to be a witch in training. In what’s become a cult classic counterpoint to the more saccharine and normal Mary Poppins, the film follows their adventurous escapades which include magical beds, underwater dance contests, Nazis, and so much more. It’s a wacky, wild ride, and Lansbury is a true joy.
3 The Picture of Dorian Gray
Loew's Inc.
In this great adaptation of the timeless Oscar Wilde story, a man cheats death and never ages so long as his painted portrait ages in his place. It’s a seemingly simple concept, but Wilde imbued it with great characters, deep philosophy, and dark melancholy, attributes which writer/director Albert Lewin perfectly harnessed in his gorgeous film (though the censors seriously damaged the ending).
Lansbury plays Sibyl Vane, the long-suffering fiancée of the titular character in The Picture of Dorian Gray. While barely 20 at the time, the actress proved her greatness (earning the only acting awards and nominations for the film), bringing heartbreaking pathos to the character. Cinematographer Harry Stradling, who won an Oscar for his work here, perfectly captures the emotionality of Lansbury’s features.
2 Manchurian Candidate
United Artists
Arguably the darkest, most vicious role that she ever took (one very incongruous with her public image), Lansbury is coldly stunning as the truly evil character Eleanor Iselin in the original 1962 version of The Manchurian Candidate. The classic John Frankenheimer film is one of the great political thrillers of all time, following Korean War veterans who have been brainwashed to act on behalf of the Soviet Union and China.
Frank Sinatra, Laurence Harvey, and Janet Leigh all star in The Manchurian Candidate, a perfectly made film that can still send chills down a viewer’s spine 60 years after its release. It’s a true testament to Lansbury’s skills that, when this film was remade in 2004, even the great Meryl Streep (who played the same part) could neither compete nor compare with Lansbury’s hypnotic, Oscar-nominated performance.
1 Murder, She Wrote
NBCUniversal Television Distribution
While this article has hopefully proven just how diverse and phenomenal Lansbury’s 80-year career was, it’s obvious that the actress was best-known and most acclaimed internationally for her truly beloved character Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. After gradually mastering the murder mystery genre, Lansbury was sent the scripts for this classic TV series when Jean Stapleton (who the part was actually written for) dropped out of the project — no offense to Stapleton, but thank God, because the rest is history.
The show followed mystery author Jessica Fletcher as she becomes an amateur detective in the small town of Cabot Cove in Maine (which apparently has more crime than anywhere else in the world). The incongruity of a sweet older woman outsmarting criminals and police alike with her creative imagination, wit, and mastery of English was simply delightful, and captivated audiences around the world. Touchingly, Lansbury’s son directed 68 episodes of the show.
What seems like a small, cute premise actually became a cultural phenomenon because of its clever writing and immaculate performance from Lansbury, peaking at 40 million viewers a week and, even by its 11th season, still pulling in 25 million weekly. Murder, She Wrote was in the top ten most-watched shows on television for eight of its seasons, and even when it ended in 1996, it was popular enough to return with four wonderful TV movies over the next eight years, each of which drew more than 10 million viewers live. Angela Lansbury earned her immortality here, and though she has left this mortal coil at the age of 96, she’ll always be a part of our culture.
