Angela Lansbury has passed away. The British actress, famous for her role in the renowned television series Murder, She Wrote (known in Italian as La Signora in Giallo), was 96 years old.
American media outlets reported the news, citing the family. “Dame Angela Lansbury’s children are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” the family stated in a press release. Born on October 16, 1925, Lansbury fled England during the war and, at just 17, she was already involved in musical theater. By the age of 19, she was under contract with MGM in Hollywood. Over her long career, she became known as the unerring detective Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote. She also played the menacing housemaid who torments Ingrid Bergman in Gaslight and the elder sister of a young Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet.
Private Life
The actress was the daughter of Edgar Isaac Lansbury, a merchant, and actress Moyna MacGill; her paternal grandfather was the politician George Lansbury. She had two brothers, twins, born in 1930: Edgar (a theater director) and Bruce, a television producer who collaborated with her on *Murder, She Wrote*, and who passed away on February 13, 2017. In 1945, she married actor Richard Cromwell; the marriage ended after a year when she learned of his bisexuality, but the two remained friends.
In 1949, she remarried actor and producer Peter Shaw (1918–2003), with whom she had two children, Anthony Pullen (1952) and Deirdre Angela (1953). Anthony became a producer and director, overseeing many episodes of Murder, She Wrote, while Deirdre married an Italian and opened a restaurant in Los Angeles. Shaw had another son, David (1944), from a previous marriage. Lansbury had three grandchildren from Anthony: Peter John (1981), Katherine (1984), and Ian (1989). Her grandson Peter John made her a great-grandmother in 2007.
Angela Lansbury was related to English actor Peter Ustinov, who passed away in 2004, and with whom she shared the screen in Death on the Nile. Ustinov had been married to Isolde Denham from 1940 to 1950, who was Angela’s half-sister through her mother, Moyna MacGill, and her first husband, Reginald Denham. The couple had a daughter before divorcing. Her nephew David Lansbury, Edgar’s son, was married to actress Ally Sheedy, though they later divorced.
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