Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury (Madame Armfeldt) has enjoyed an unprecedented career spanning more than 60 years, first as a star of motion pictures, and as an award-winning stage actor in New York and London. Most recently, she appeared as Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, for which she won her fifth Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards, and she performed in 2006 in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, for which she was also nominated for a Tony. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 as Bert Lahr’s wife in Hotel Paradiso. In 1960, she returned to Broadway as Joan Plowright’s mother in the season’s most acclaimed drama, A Taste of Honey, by Shelagh Delaney. A year later, she starred in her first musical, Anyone Can Whistle. Lansbury returned to Broadway in triumph in 1966 in Mame, for which she won her first Tony. She received others as the Madwoman of Chaillot in Dear World (1968), as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of Gypsy and as Mrs. Lovett in Sweeney Todd (1979). From 1984-1996 she starred as Jessica Fletcher, mystery-writing amateur sleuth, on Murder, She Wrote, the longest-running detective drama series in the history of television, and won four Golden Globe Awards. In 1994, Queen Elizabeth named her a Commander of the British Empire, and in 2000 she received the Kennedy Center Honors. Married in 1949, she and husband Peter worked together until his death in 2003. She has three children and three grandchildren.
