Angela Lansbury, a versatile actor who wowed generations of fans as a murderous baker, a singing teapot, a Soviet spy and a small-town sleuth among a host of other memorial roles, died on Tuesday, her family announced. She was 96.
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 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday," her family said in a statement.
The London-born actor took her life’s final bow as one of the most decorated players in stage history.
Lansbury won five Tony Awards, most recently in 2009 for best featured actress in a play for her work in Noel Coward’s “Blithe Spirit.”
Her best known work on the Great White Way was probably as ghoulish pie maker Nellie Lovett, in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” She cooked up a Tony for best musical actress in 1979 for that role.
Her other three Tony wins were for best actress in a musical for “Mame” in 1966, “Dear World” in 1969 and “Gypsy” in 1975.
Audra McDonald and Julie Harris are the only actors to win six Tonys; Harris’ sixth Tony was for lifetime achievement.
Lansbury took her singing skill from Broadway to the big screen, via an animator’s drawing board of the 1991 musical “Beauty and the Beast.”
Lansbury voiced the sentimental Mrs. Pott, which scored as one of the popular movie’s most beloved moments.
She took to the stage at Lincoln Center in New York in 2016 to celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary, and brought the house down with a rendition of the title’s lead tune.
The actor had already enjoyed a long and successful career when she took on the small-screen role that many Americans will remember most — as mystery writer and amateur crime fighter Jessica Fletcher on the CBS Sunday night hit “Murder, She Wrote.”