Angela Lansbury Biography
Angela Lansbury is a British-American-Irish actress who has appeared in theatre, television, and film. Her career has spanned eight decades, much of it in the United States, and her work has attracted international acclaim.
Angela Lansbury Age
Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925, in Regent’s Park, London, England. He is 93 years old as of 2018.
Angela Lansbury Children
Lansbury with her 2 children, with her long-time 2nd husband Peter Shaw daughter Deirdre and son Anthony.
Angela Lansbury Family
Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family on October 16, 1925. Although her birthplace has often been given as Poplar, East London, she has rejected this, asserting that while she had ancestral connections to Poplar, she was born in Regent’s Park, Central London.
Her mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna Macgill (born Charlotte Lillian McIldowie), who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films. 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, a man whom she felt “awed” by and considered “a giant in my youth.” Angela had an older half-sister, Isolde, who was the daughter of Moyna’s previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham.
In January 1930, when Angela was four, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Bruce and Edgar, leading the Lansburys to move from their Poplar flat to a house in Mill Hill, North London; on weekends they would vacate to a rural farm in Berrick Salome, near Wallingford, Oxfordshire.
When Lansbury was nine, her father died from stomach cancer; she retreated into playing characters as a coping mechanism. In 2014, Lansbury described this event as “the defining moment of my life. Nothing before or since has affected me so deeply.” Facing financial difficulty, her mother became engaged to a Scottish colonel, Leckie Forbes, and moved into his house in Hampstead
Angela Lansbury Education
Lansbury receiving an education at South Hampstead High School from 1934 until 1939. She nevertheless considered herself largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre, and cinema. She became a self-professed “complete movie maniac”, visiting the cinema regularly and imagining herself as certain characters.
Keen on playing the piano, she briefly studied music at the Ritman School of Dancing, and in 1940 began studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington, West London, first appearing on stage as a lady-in-waiting in the school’s production of Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland.
That year, Angela’s grandfather died, and with the onset of the Blitz, Macgill decided to take Angela, Bruce, and Edgar to the United States; Isolde remained in Britain with her new husband, the actor Peter Ustinov. Macgill secured a job supervising sixty British children who were being evacuated to North America aboard the Duchess of Athol, arriving with them in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in mid-August.
From there, she proceeded by train to New York City, where she was financially sponsored by a Wall Street businessman, Charles T. Smith, moving in with his family at their home at Mahopac, New York. Lansbury gained a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing allowing her to study at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, where she appeared in performances of William Congreve’s The Way of the World and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. She graduated in March 1942, by which time the family had moved to a flat in Morton Street, Greenwich Village.
Angela Lansbury Award | Nomination
Lansbury has received an Honorary Oscar and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award.
She has also been nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on eighteen occasions, as well as a Grammy award for her work on the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack for the 1991 Disney animated film Beauty and the Beast. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She has been the subject of three biographies.
Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in eleven further films for MGM, mostly in supporting roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances.
Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finest performances. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her a range of awards.
Angela Lansbury Movies
- Little Woman On Masterpiece
- The Grinch
- Great Performances
- Mr. Popper’s Penguins
- Dramatic Anthologies
- Nanny Mcphee
- The Golden Age
Angela Lansbury Career
Return to the theatre: 1997–present
Following the end of Murder, She Wrote, Lansbury returned to the theatre. Although cast in the lead role in the 2001 Kander and Ebb musical The Visit, she withdrew before it opened due to her husband’s deteriorating health. Peter died in January 2003 of congestive heart failure at the couple’s Brentwood, California home.
Lansbury felt that after this event she would not take on any more major acting roles and that instead might make a few cameo appearances but nothing more. Wanting to spend more time in New York City, in 2006 she purchased a $2 million condominium in Manhattan, and in a 2014 interview noted that she also had homes in Ireland and Los Angeles.
Angela Lansbury in Deuce, New York City, 2007
She made an appearance in a Season 6 episode of the television show Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, for which she was nominated for an Emmy Award in 2005. She starred in the 2005 film Nanny McPhee as Aunt Adelaide, commenting that it was “such fun to play a baddie!” and later informing an interviewer that working on Nanny McPhee “pulled me out of the abyss” after the loss of her husband.
She then appeared in the 2011 film Mr. Popper’s Penguins, opposite Jim Carrey. Lansbury returned to Broadway after a 23-year absence in Deuce, a play by Terrence McNally that opened at the Music Box Theatre in May 2007 for a limited run of eighteen weeks. Lansbury received a Tony Award nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play for her role.
In March 2009 she returned to Broadway for a revival of Blithe Spirit at the Shubert Theatre, where she took on the role of Madame Arcati. Discussing the character, she stated: “I love her. She’s completely off-the-wall but utterly secure in her own convictions.”
This appearance earned her the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play; this was her fifth Tony Award, tying her with the previous record holder for the number of Tony Awards, Julie Harris, albeit all of Harris’ Tonys were for Best Leading Actress.
From December 2009 to June 2010, Lansbury then starred as Madame Armfeldt alongside Catherine Zeta-Jones in the first Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, held at the Walter Kerr Theatre. The role earned her a seventh Tony Award nomination, while in May 2010, she was awarded an honorary doctoral degree from Manhattan School of Music.
From April to July 2012, Lansbury starred as women’s rights advocate Sue-Ellen Gamadge in the Broadway revival of Gore Vidal’s The Best Man at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre. From February to June 2013, Lansbury starred alongside James Earl Jones in an Australian tour of Driving Miss Daisy.
In November 2013, she received an Academy Honorary Award for her lifetime achievement at the Governors Awards. From March to June 2014, Lansbury reprised her performance as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit at the Gielgud Theatre in London’s West End, her first London stage appearance in nearly 40 years.
While in London, she made an appearance at the Angela Lansbury Film Festival in Poplar, a screening of some of her most popular films organized by Poplar Film. From December 2014 to March 2015 she joined the tour of Blithe Spirit across North America.
In April 2015, aged 89, she received her first Olivier Award as Best Supporting Actress for her performance as Arcati, and in November 2015 was awarded the Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.
On June 2, 2016, it was officially announced that Lansbury would return to Broadway in the 2017–18 season in a revival of Enid Bagnold’s 1955 play The Chalk Garden. The play was produced by Scott Rudin at a theatre to-be-announced.
However, in an interview published on September 20, 2016, Lansbury stated that she will not be performing in The Chalk Garden, stating, in part: “At my time of life, I’ve decided that I want to be with family more and being alone in New York doing a play requires an extraordinary amount of time left alone.”
In December 2017, Lansbury took on the role of Aunt March in the BBC television miniseries Little Women. She also co-starred in Mary Poppins Returns, a sequel to the Academy Award-winning 1964 original film, set 20 years later in Depression-era London. Filming began at Shepperton Studios on February 2017, and the film was released in December 2018.
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