This week’s new Person of the week is a woman known by everybody as a TV hobby detective, but who – as I found out when researching about her – has done so many other things that I was simply amazed!
I’m talking about Angela Lansbury, the famous Jessica Fletcher from the murder mystery series “Murder, she wrote“.
Born in London in 1925, she was the daughter of the Northern Irish actress Moyna Macgill and of the politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain who died when Angela was only 9. The family had a solid left-wing tradition: her grandfather George Lansbury was a founder of the Labour Party.
In 1940 Angela started studying acting in West London, but after the death of her father, Angela’s mother became engaged to a Scottish colonel and with the onset of the bombings of Germany’s Blitz against the UK, the family moved to America, where she graduated in 1942 starting her career as an actor and a singer.
She has been a naturalised American for many years, but kept bonds to the UK and she also always felt a strong link to Ireland, where here mother came from. Her accent, though having a slight American influence, has always remained essentially British.
Early in her career she starred in several movies, working with big international stars like Ingrid Bergam in Gaslight (1944), Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet (1944) and Frank Sinatra in the Cold War thriller The Manchurian Candidate (1962). For her role in these movies she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Academy Award but both time she didn’t win.
It seems to be Angela Lansbury’s destiny to be nominated for prizes but not to win them!
She holds a record for the most losses by a nominated artist at an industry award: during her career she has been nominated three times as Best Supporting Actress for the Academy Awards and even 18 (!!) times for the Emmy Awards, but she never won! Even if at first she was very disappointed, she didn’t take this too seriously and just said that she was glad not to win as she would have otherwise had a less successful career.
I must admit that when I read about this last (negative) record it made me feel more sympathy for Angela Lansbury!
But one must also add that later on she won a Golden Globe and a People’s Choice Award for her work, and in 1994 Queen Elizabeth appointed her Commander of the Order of the British Empire for services to the dramatic arts and in 2014 she was further promoted to Dame Commander, which of course can just be seen as silly British titles, but still gave her the recognision she definitely deserves!
During her career she starred in so many movies that it’s almost impossible to list them all (if you are interested, just have a look at Wikipedia) – but I was really surprised to find out how active she has been!
In the second part of the 1960s she started working in theatres, for example she starred in the musical “Mame” by Jerry Herman, where she was praised not only for her acting qualities but also for her singing. The New York Times also once referred to Lansbury as the “First Lady of Musical Theatre”. Through the musical “Mame” she also gained a lot of fans in the gay community.
Speaking of gay community… Another interesting detail in Angela Lansbury’s biography is about her private life: in 1945 – aged only 20 – she married Richard Cromwell, a 35-year-old American actor with career problems. It is said that he knew to be gay but decided to marry Angela in the hope that this would turn him straight. Of course things didn’t go as expected and they got divorced just after 7 months. During their marriage Angela wasn’t aware that Richard was gay and she found out only after they separated, but they remained friends until his death in 1960.
Later on she met another man – Peter Shaw, a British actor – who became her second husband and lifelong companion – this time without any surprises! Angela once even said: “We had the perfect relationship. Not many people can say that.” He also managed Angela Lansbury’s career and they had 2 children together.
The only thorn in her “perfect relationship” seem to have been the drug habits of her 2 children – Anthony and Deidre – who back in the wild 1960s when living in Malibu started taking drugs – at first cannabis, but later also heroin. To take them away from the bad influence of people who were also connected to Charles Manson, Angela moved with the family back to County Cork in Ireland. And then everything was alright and thank God Anthony and Deidre were back on track.
In 1979 she appeared in another well-received musical thriller – Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street – and after starring in several other movies and theatre plays, she also was offered a role which will in some way anticipate her later “lifetime role” as detective Jessica Fletcher: she played the role of Miss Murple in the 1980 movie version of Agatha Christie’s The Mirror Crack’d.
I must admit, I like Angela Lansbury and I think she was a really great choice in the role as Miss Murple, but the real Miss Murple can be just the one and only Margaret Rutherford. Sorry, Angela, but there is no contest!
MURDER, SHE WROTE
Angela Lansbury’s real success and global fame came with the series “Murder, She Wrote” which run from 1984 to 1996 and with its 12 seasons and 264 episodes is one of the most successfull and longest running TV shows in history.
This show really filled a lot of lazy afternoons when I was a child. Every time I hear the theme song of this series I have to think back and see myself as a child in front of the TV at my grandmother’s place watching Jessica Fletcher going round trying to solve some new murder in her home town of Cabot Cove.
Jessica Fletcher was a widowed, retired English teacher who wrote murder mystery books. For some strange reason, every time she went somewhere, a dead body was found. The criminal statics of Cabot Cove must have been even worse of those of a Mexican city plagued by some drug cartel wars!
Malicious gossip has it that she must have in some way involved in all those murders – otherwise you really couldn’t explain why everytime she was around someone had to die! If I knew she came to visit me, I would have for sure left the country out of superstition!
Anyway, at least Jessica Fletcher always seemed to have enough material for her books. And she also always seemed to be wittier than the officials involved in solving the murder cases.
Imagine how terrible it must have been for the Cabot Cove police to always have this nice but admittedly smart-ass woman around always minding other people’s business and putting her nose into everything the police were doing.
Ok, in the end she always solved the mystery of those deaths, but I wonder how in all those years one of those murders were not committed by a Cabot Cove police officer, the victim being this goddamned Jessica Fletcher!
I was probably not the only one spending time in front of this TV series, which is apparently known all over the world. Here I made a list of the name of the show in different languages.
Murder, She Wrote
Some languages stick to the original English title:
- Spanish: Se ha escrito un crimen (= a crime has been written)
- Polish: Napisała: Morderstwo (= she wrote: murder)
- Swedish: Mord och inga visor (= murder, she wrote)
But the title in other languages tends to slightly differ from the original one:
- Portuguese: Crime, Disse Ela (= crime, she said)
- Danish: Hun så et mord (= she saw a murder)
- German: Mord ist ihr Hobby (= murder is her hobby)
- Italian: La signora in giallo (= the lady in yellow – a “yellow book” is in Italy a crime mystery book)
- French: Arabesque (which is actually an Arabic ornamental design made out of intertwined lines, probably referring to the quite entangled plots of the stories in the series)
After her success with Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury concentrated on her theatre career and to these days – aged 90! – she’s playing in theatre plays in Broadway and on tour all over the world. What a lady!
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