Midnight Oil:Movies and More

"Murder She Wrote" was not all she did. Angela Lansbury started out in the British Isles as a hardworking actress back in the day. She ended up populating the small screen as a very recognizable face on American TV.

Supposedly, young Angela, her brothers, and her mother came over to America on the last boat organized for refugees from the London Blitz to cross the Atlantic early in World War II. She got her "big break" in restarting in show business in North America by travelling to Montreal, lying about her age (she was only 16 and not 19), and working as a singer in a night club. Later on, when her mother was an out-of-work actress in Hollywood, it was Angela who got the big break by working on a film instead of working at her job at a local department store. Angela played the maid in "Gaslight" in 1944 literally lighting the gas for the big names in Hollywood, Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer. This gig resulted in steady work and a multi-year contract with MGM. Angela got the job because she could speak with an authentic cockney accent. She came by it naturally enough because of the time she had spent in poorer sections of East London where her father had been the mayor. Her father died before the war and did not come with the family to the U.S. of A.

Angela married the love of her life, another relatively unknown British actor, when she was 24. Peter Shaw did not work much as an actor throughout their very long 54-year marriage. Peter remained behind the scenes making his wife a great success. Her very brief marriage to another man before this union lasted less than a year. She didn't know that he was gay.

Lansbury worked steadily on both sides of the Atlantic on stage and screen, on radio and television. She played in a range of roles. As she got a bit older, she sometimes played the mother when she was in fact only a few years older than the other actor. This is how she got to be Elvis Presley's mother in "Blue Hawaii" in 1961 when she was 10 years older than him. She also played an elderly 75 year-old main character when she was 44. Her final performance came at 94 on stage in "The Importance of Being Earnest". Lansbury played the plum part of Lady Bracknell, a woman of perhaps half that age in a play written by the witty Wilde one hundred and twenty years before. Lansbury's last professional performance as an actress was in 2019. By the end of her career, she had been nominated for several Oscars, won some Tonys and collected a host of other nominations, prizes, lifetime achievement and honorary awards. Lansbury even won the Olivier Award for the London Stage theatre sixteen years after playing opposite the legendary actor himself, Laurence Olivier. They were in a made-for-TV movie together. Angela Lansbury was one of a handful of actors who worked consistently at their craft throughout the decades up into their 80s and 90s.

In 1984 when Angela Lansbury played opposite Laurence Olivier in that made for TV movie, "A Talent for Murder", she was essentially auditioning for the role that would make her most famous. In this movie with Laurence Olivier, Lansbury played a mystery writer turned into a daytime real-life sleuth investigating murders in the real world. Lansbury showed that she had the talent to play Jessica Fletcher, the heroine of "Murder She Wrote". The formula worked with the mostly bloodless murder mysteries. A wide-ranging audience from teens to grannies loved the formulaic TV show. It was so popular that it was renewed for12 seasons making it a tie with "Hawaii Five-O" for the longest running TV detective show. With all that blood (NOT) spilled, TV stations have had lots of material with a wide appeal for endless reruns.

Lansbury has done it all when it comes to the murder mystery. In the 1974 remake of the classic Alfred Hitchcock movie "The Lady Vanishes" she played the lady who vanishes, the mystery woman, Miss Foy. In 1978, Angela progressed on from the nearly invisible Miss Foy to the character of Mrs. Salome, the very visible and overblown character who is one of several victims in "Death on the Nile". The famous plot from master mystery writer Agatha Christie obliged Lansbury to share the silver screen with some famous actors like David Niven and Peter Ustinov. In real life below decks on the real boat where they were filming the movie, Angela was obliged to share her room with bunkmate Bette Davis due to very limited space availability in hot climes. Reportedly, the two actresses became fast friends due to this "tight squeeze" of an experience. In the mid-century, Lansbury managed to play a character who was both the accused and the murderer in a murder trial. It's hard to tell if she is also supposed to be the victim all in one in "Please Muder Me". Apparently, Raymond Burr was doing an inadvertent audition during this film for his future famous role in the long-running legal drama series. Burr played Perry Mason, a lawyer who ends up finding the real murderer to win his murder cases. Angela Lansbury helped Raymond Burr to become Perry Mason before there was a Perry Mason series. Finally, Lansbury graduated to becoming the great female sleuth of Agatha Christie's creation, Miss Marple. In "The Mirror Crack'd" Miss Marple investigates the attempted murder of a Hollywood film star transported to life in a small English village after she buys a mansion there. Supposedly the Hollywood film star in the movie played by an aging Liz Taylor is loosely based on the tragic events of the real-life Hollywood beauty Gene Tierney. All three of these ladies, Tierney, Taylor, and Lansbury are approximately of the same generation. They were wonderful beauties in their youth and were considered good actresses with very long careers. Each was famous, although not famous during the same era.

Before and after her long stint as Jessica Fletcher in "Murder She Wrote" Angela Lansbury had a long and multi-faceted career. In order to retain more control over what happened to the character of Jessica Fletcher, Lansbury became a producer on the show, adding to her credits in the entertainment world and to the show's success. I think that it is fair to say that Angela Lansbury more than met her lifelong goal of being an entertaining entertainer.

See Lansbury's life ambitions upon mature reflection.