Angela Lansbury: five things you might not know about Murder, She Wrote star

Dame Angela Lansbury, star of film, TV, and theatre for 80 years, has died at the age of 96.

The Irish-British-American actor was best known for her leading role in the long-running US TV show Murder, She Wrote, in which she played Jessica Fletcher, a crime writer turned amateur detective. Lansbury was also a prominent star in films in Hollywood’s Golden Age, though her career was later defined by success on Broadway, including roles in Mame and Sweeney Todd.

Lansbury was “one of the biggest women of American theatre and screen” said Mark Lawson at The Guardian, and part of the “acting aristocracy” in Britain, Ireland and the US.

While her stage and screen presence is well known to multiple generations, here are a few things you may not have known about the late star.

Her grandfather was leader of the Labour Party

Lansbury was born in the Regent’s Park area of London in 1925, her mother an Irish actress and her father a former mayor of Poplar, east London, and a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

Her grandfather, George, had also been mayor of Poplar and led councillors in the Poplar rates rebellion in 1921 which saw him and 29 councillors sent to prison. A lifelong socialist, pacifist, and advocate of women’s rights, he led the Labour Party between 1932 and 1935 after its crushing election defeat in 1931. 

He was “at the vanguard of a new generation of Labour leaders in London”, said The Guardian, and he “paved the way” in positioning Labour as the “radical representatives of the working class”.

Angela Lansbury was “inordinately proud of her family’s political stance” said The Times, and politics would have been her “second choice of career” if it weren’t for acting.

She was Oscar nominated for her first film

As the Blitz began to ravage London in 1940, Angela’s mother decided to move her family to the United States “aboard the last passenger ship to leave England until 1945” said The Times. After studying at the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York she moved to Hollywood with her mother in 1942 and was quickly cast in the movie Gaslight, released in 1944.

Article source: https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/958167/angela-lansbury-5-things-you-might-not-know-about-murder-she-wrote-star