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Angela Lansbury

Lansbury was born in London, the daughter of a Belfast-born actress, Moyna MacGill and the granddaughter of Labour politician George Lansbury. She moved to the United States at the beginning of World War II and became a naturalised citizen in 1951.

As a struggling young actress in Los Angeles, Lansbury worked at the Bullocks Wilshire department store.

Lansbury made her Academy Award nominated film debut in 1944 as an impertinent maid in the film with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This performance was followed by another Oscar nomination for the Oscar Wilde film (1945). She has since enjoyed a long and varied career, mainly as a film actress, appearing in everything from (1962) as the overbearing mother of a brainwashed assassin, won much praise and won her a third Oscar nomination. In the film, Lansbury's son was played by Laurence Harvey, who was only three years younger than she. Lansbury has been quoted in an interview with CNN's Larry King as saying that this was her favorite of her many film roles.

She played Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in (1982), winning a great deal of praise for her affectionate turn as the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit (1991). She also did character work as the Dowager Empress in the less well-received animated film in 1997.

On Broadway, Lansbury received good reviews from her very first musical outing, the short-lived 1964 Stephen Sondheim musical opposite Bea Arthur as Vera, earned Lansbury her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical. Subsequent Tony awards were earned for 1980) for dramatic achievement in Chicago theatre. Her English music-hall turn as meat-pie entrepreneuse Mrs. Lovett in Sondheim's ballad opera earned her yet another Tony Award in 1979. She has received a Tony nomination for every lead role she has essayed on Broadway, and won each time, unlike her unlucky record at the Oscars.

As Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, (1984 -1996), she found her biggest success and a worldwide following. It was to be one of the longest running prime time detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world and a record as the most nominated lead actress without a win in the prime time Emmy awards (with 12 nominations).

In the early 1990s Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom awarded Angela Lansbury the CBE. She was named a Disney Legend in 1995. She received a Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, and Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.

Lansbury was briefly married from 1945-46 to American actor Richard Cromwell when she was 19 and Cromwell was 35. In 1948, Lansbury remarried, to Irish-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw, who had been a former boyfriend of the much-older actress, Joan Crawford. Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Ms. Lansbury's career. Until Shaw's death in 2003, Lansbury enjoyed one of the longest and most prolific of show-business marriages.

Lansbury is the mother of two, stepmother of one, and a proud grandmother several times over. Her son, Antony, was producer, and is today a television executive. Lansbury's daughter, Deirdre Angela Shaw Battarrais, who beat a serious drug addiction with her devoted mother's help (Lansbury moved to rural Ireland from California to escape the scourge of drugs) and is today, along with her Italian-born husband Enzo, the co-manager of a popular cafe, Ristorante Positano, in West Los Angeles, California. However, her devotion to her daughter may be put into question by the fact that in the '60s she gave her daughter written permission to travel with the Manson Family.

Lansbury was related by her half-sister Isolde's marriage to the late British actor, Sir Peter Ustinov; the two in-laws appeared together professionally just once in 1978's Lansbury is today related -- by the marriage of her nephew David Lansbury -- to the American actress Ally Sheedy. A footnote is that one of Ms. Lansbury's two twin brothers, Edgar Lansbury, was the producer of , the smash-hit broadway musical, in the 1970s.

Today, Lansbury, a longtime resident of Brentwood, California takes time to support various philanthropic groups. Lansbury was the Guest of Honor at the 14th annual Gala and Fundraiser on April 16, 2005 for Women in Recovery, Inc., a Venice, California-based non-profit organization offering a live-in, 12-Step program of rehabilitation for women in need. Past Honorees of this organization have included Jamie Lee Curtis and Sir Anthony Hopkins.

Lansbury had knee replacement surgery on July 14, 2005. [1]

Lansbury also enjoys vacation time regularly at her home in County Cork, Ireland.

Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 43rd Annual Tony Awards", 1990)Outstanding Individual Performance in a Variety or Music Program ("The 41st Annual Tony Awards", 1987)