![]() ![]() Her father was socialist politician Edgar Isaac Lansbury (1887-1935), a member of both the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and the Labour Party. “Thank you for having me back,” she said in her emotional acceptance speech.A prominent family of the upper middle class living in the Regent's Park neighborhood of London. (Lansbury’s fifth and final Tony would come in 2009, for best supporting actress in a play-the revival of Blithe Spirit-which she won 43 years after her first. The show went on to win eight Tony Awards, including ones for Lansbury-her fourth-Cariou, Prince, Sondheim, and for the show itself as best musical. Later convinced by Sondheim and Prince that the role was equal to the one that would eventually go to Len Cariou, Lansbury signed on, and delivered a performance that The New York Times described as “towering” (and that, luckily, was later recorded for television). I put down the phone and said to my husband, ‘Hmmm, all right, this show is called Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street. ![]() “Hal said he wanted me to play the role of Nellie Lovett. ![]() “I was in Ireland when a woman called to say, ‘There’s a telegram here from New York from a fella named Harold Prince,’” Lansbury told New York magazine in 2009, referring to the show’s director. Lovett in the Grand Guignol musical Sweeney Todd.īut that collaboration got off to a slightly rocky start. In 1975, Lansbury was reunited with Sondheim when she starred in the first Broadway revival of Gypsy (and for which she would win another Tony), setting the stage for their next venture together-and perhaps Lansbury’s greatest Broadway role-Mrs. It was a win she would repeat three years later, when starring in Herman’s Dear World, the musical adaptation of the Jean Giraudoux play The Madwoman of Chaillot. He prevailed against the wishes of his producers, who wanted a bigger name, and the result was a triumph: Lansbury ended up on the cover of Life and won that season’s Tony Award for best actress in a musical. More importantly, among the few people to see that show before it closed was Jerry Herman, and it convinced him that Lansbury should take the title role in the new musical he was then writing, Mame. ![]() The show flopped, closing just nine days after its opening night, but it cemented a close professional and personal relationship with its composer: Stephen Sondheim. She said she sang “A Foggy Day,” and though she was not a trained singer, “I got away with it.” “I can’t begin to tell you what a thrill it was” when the show’s author, Arthur Laurents, reached out to ask if she would audition, Lansbury once told an interviewer. In 1964, Lansbury played the lead character in a new musical, Anyone Can Whistle. As Variety reported in 1943, the young actress, newly arrived in California (having emigrated during the London Blitz with her widowed mother, the British actress Moyna MacGil), was at a Hollywood dinner party when she was spotted by the playwright John Van Druten.Ī second career soon beckoned on Broadway. A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.”īorn October 16, 1925, Lansbury was cast in Gaslight, her first film, at 17 years old, in a tale that rivals Lana Turner being discovered at the Schwab’s lunch counter. She was preceded in death by her husband of 53 years, Peter Shaw. “In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre, and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury. today,” her family revealed in a statement. “The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 a.m. In her later years, Lansbury went on to conquer the stages of Broadway, winning five Tony Awards, as well as star in a prime-time television series that ran for 12 seasons. Angela Lansbury, the London-born actress who created memorably sinister characters in the Hollywood films Gaslight and The Manchurian Candidate, died on Tuesday, just five days short of her 97th birthday. ![]()
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