Angela Lansbury, Star of Film, Stage and 'Murder, She Composed,' Passes on at 96

Angela Lansbury, Star of Film, Stage and 'Murder, She Composed,' Passes on at 96

She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, yet she caught the greatest crowd of her vocation as the television investigator Jessica Fletcher.

Angela Lansbury, a considerable entertainer who spellbound Hollywood in her childhood, turned into a Broadway melodic sensation in middle age and afterward drew a huge number of fans as a bereft secret essayist on the long-running TV series "Murder, She Composed," kicked the bucket on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.

Her demise was reported in a proclamation by her loved ones.

Ms. Lansbury was the champ of five Tony Grants for her featuring exhibitions on the New York stage, from "Mame" in 1966 to "Merry Soul" in 2009, when she was 83, a demonstration of her uncommon endurance. However she showed up on Broadway just occasionally more than a seven-decade profession in film, theater and TV in which there were likewise years when nothing appeared to be coming up roses.

The English-conceived girl of an Irish entertainer, she was only 18 when she handled her most memorable film job, as Charles Boyer's saucy Cockney worker in the thrill ride "Gaslight" (1944), a gifted presentation that carried her an agreement with MGM and a Foundation Grant designation for best supporting entertainer. She got a second Oscar selection in 1946, for her supporting exhibition as a ballroom young lady in "The Image of Dorian Dim."

It was an overjoyed beginning for a young lady who at 14 had escaped wartime London with her mom and had as of late moved on from New York's Feagin School of Emotional Craftsmanship. Ms. Lansbury envisioned she could have a future as a main woman, yet, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not happy attempting to ascend that stepping stool.

"I wasn't truly adept at being a celebrity," she said. "I would have rather not postured for cheesecake photographs and something like that."

It could likewise have involved bones. Her full, round face was not appropriate for the sensational lighting of the time, which inclined toward the more precise looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. Regardless, she showed up in numerous a forgettable film prior to breaking out as the impressive, silly auntie in "Mame" on Broadway.

MGM consistently cast her as a more established lady, or a frightful one. Of the 11 films she made later "Dorian Dim," maybe her most prominent job was in "Condition of the Association" (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a paper head honcho attempting to get her hitched sweetheart chosen president.

With the termination of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury enlisted in the public visiting creations of two phase plays, "Is not yet clear" and "Undertakings of State." However when she got back to the films as an independent entertainer, she again ended up cast as both of two kinds: as she put it, "bitches on haggles' moms."

She was Elvis Presley's possessive mother in "Blue Hawaii" (1961). She was Laurence Harvey's evil mother in "The Manchurian Competitor" (1962), a job that won her a third supporting entertainer Oscar designation. (However she was just three years Mr. Harvey's senior, her maternal authority was completely persuading when she told him, "You are to shoot the official chosen one through the head.") She played a lady who kills her significant other in "Kindly Homicide Me" (1956) and an oppressive mother in "The Hesitant Debutante" (1958). Thus it went.