Dame Angela Lansbury died this week just days before what would have been her 97th birthday. Born in London to the English Communist politician Edgar Lansbury and Irish actress Moyna Macgill, she moved to the U.S. in 1940 as Nazi Germany attacked Britain from the air.
Lansbury made her film debut in 1944 with Gaslight and spent much of the 1950s in B-movies before appearing in The Manchurian Candidate (1962), which garnered her third Oscar nomination. On stage, she played the title role in Mame, earning her first Tony Award in 1966. In the 1980s and ‘90s, she was a primetime mainstay on the series Murder, She Wrote and sang the title song in 1991’s Beauty and the Beast.
