Angela Lansbury
Angela Lansbury, actress
Born	Angela Brigid Lansbury (1925-10-16) 16 October 1925 (age 86) Poplar, London, England
Nationality	English
Occupation	Actress, Singer, Television Producer, Writer
Years active	1943-present
Known for	Murder She Wrote, Mame, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, Beauty and the Beast
Spouse	Richard Cromwell (1945–46; divorced) Peter Shaw (1949–2003; his death); 2 children

Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English-born US-naturalized actress and singer in theatre, television, and motion pictures. Her career has spanned eight decades and earned an unsurpassed number of performance Tony Awards (tied with Julie Harris), with five wins. Her first film appearance was in the film Gaslight (1944) as a conniving maid, for which she received an Academy Award nomination. Among her other films are The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), Beauty and the Beast (1991), and Anastasia (1997).

She expanded her repertoire to Broadway musicals and television in the 1950s and was particularly successful in Broadway productions of Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. Lansbury is perhaps best known to modern audiences for her twelve-year run starring as writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–1996). Her recent roles include Lady Adelaide Stitch in the film Nanny McPhee (2005), Leona Mullen in the 2007 Broadway play Deuce, Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of the play Blithe Spirit and Madame Armfeldt in the 2010 Broadway revival of the musical A Little Night Music.

Lansbury has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and has been nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and nineteen Emmy Awards.

Early life[link]

Lansbury was born in Poplar, London, to Northern Irish-born actress Moyna MacGill and timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the London Borough of Poplar.^[1] Her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader George Lansbury.^[2] She is the elder sister of twins Edgar Lansbury and Bruce Lansbury, both producers,^[2] and a cousin of the late English animator and puppeteer Oliver Postgate. Another cousin was the academic and novelist Coral Lansbury, whose son is former Australian federal Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull.^[3]

Her earliest theatrical influences were the teenaged actress Deanna Durbin, screen star Irene Dunne and Lansbury's mother, who encouraged her daughter's ambition by taking her to plays at the Old Vic.^{[citation needed]} She attended South Hampstead High School for Girls, the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art from 1939–40, and the Feagin School of Dramatic Art in New York from 1940-42.^[4] Following her father's death from stomach cancer in 1934,^[2] her mother became involved with a Scotsman named Leckie Forbes, and the two merged their families under one roof in Hampstead. A former colonel with the British Army in India, Forbes proved to be a jealous and suspicious tyrant who ruled the household with an iron fist.^{[citation needed]}

Just prior to the London Blitz, Lansbury's mother took her children to New York City. They arrived in NY on August 25, 1940. When her mother settled in Hollywood following a tour of a Noël Coward play, Lansbury (and later her brothers) joined her there.^[5] Lansbury worked at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles.^[6] At one of the parties that her mother hosted for British émigré performers in their Laurel Canyon home, Lansbury met the casting director for the upcoming film Gaslight (1944), and he offered her the part of Nancy Oliver, Ingrid Bergman's conniving maid. This was the 18-year-old Lansbury's first film role.^[6] She was nominated for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar^[6] and the following year gained another nomination for her performance as the doomed Sibyl Vane in the film The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945).^[6]

Career[link]

Theatre[link]

Angela Lansbury in Deuce, New York City, 2007

On Broadway, Lansbury first appeared in the plays Hotel Paradiso (1957) and A Taste of Honey (1960). Her first musical was the short-lived Anyone Can Whistle (1964) by Stephen Sondheim.^[7]

In 1966, she played the title role in the musical Mame, Jerry Herman's musical adaptation of the novel Auntie Mame. Mame opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in May 1966, with Stanley Kauffmann writing in the New York Times, "Miss Lansbury is a singing-dancing actress, not a singer or dancer who also acts...In this marathon role she has wit, poise, warmth, and a very taking coolth."^[8] Lansbury received her first Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical.^[9][10]

Lansbury won her second Tony Award for her performance in Dear World (1969).^[11] In 1971, Lansbury was cast in the title role in the musical Prettybelle. After a difficult rehearsal period, the show opened to brutal reviews in tryouts in Boston, where it closed within a week.^[12][13] In 1982, a recording of the show was released by Varèse Sarabande.^[14]

In 1973, the first revival of Gypsy opened in London's West End, with Lansbury starring as Rose.^[15] In September 1974, the same production opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theatre.^[15] Lansbury received her third Tony for her performance in Gypsy.^[11] In December 1975, she portrayed Gertrude in the Royal National Theatre, London, production of Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall.^[16]

During the summer of 1976, she repeated the title role in Mame at The Muny, St. Louis, Missouri. She was a three-week replacement for the role of Anna in the Broadway revival of The King and I in April 1978.^[17][18]

Lansbury starred as Mrs. Lovett in the original 1979 production of Stephen Sondheim's musical thriller Sweeney Todd. The New York Times reviewer noted that "Her songs ... are awesomely difficult and she does them awesomely well. Her voice is a visible voice; you can follow it amid any confusion".^[19] She later played the role in the first U.S. tour, from 1980 to 1981,^[20] which was taped for television while playing in Los Angeles and broadcast on September 12, 1982.^[21] She won another Tony Award for Actress in a Musical for this role.^[22][23]

Signing autographs for fans after performing in Blithe Spirit, 2009.

She had been cast in the lead role in the 2001 Kander and Ebb musical The Visit, but she withdrew from the show before it opened because of her husband's declining health.^[24] Lansbury returned to Broadway after an absence of twenty-three years in Deuce, a play by Terrence McNally. The play opened at the Music Box Theatre in May 2007 in a limited run of eighteen weeks.^[25] Lansbury received a nomination for Best Leading Actress in a Play for her role.^[11]

She played the role of Madame Arcati in the 2009 Broadway revival of Blithe Spirit, at the Shubert Theatre in March 2009. The New York Times praised her performance,^[26] for which she won several awards, including the Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play (her fifth Tony, tying her with Julie Harris, although all of Harris's wins were as Best Actress).^[27]

Lansbury starred as Madame Armfeldt in the first Broadway revival of A Little Night Music, which opened in December 2009 at the Walter Kerr Theatre.^[28] She left the show on June 20, 2010. For this role, she received a 2010 Tony Award nomination for Best Featured Actress in a Musical, but lost to Katie Finneran.^[11]

Film and television[link]

Lansbury in a scene from MGM's Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), one of her earliest film appearances.

Lansbury has enjoyed a long and varied career, sometimes in roles older than her actual age. ^[6] She appeared in films such as Gaslight (1944), National Velvet (1944), The Harvey Girls (1946), Samson and Delilah (1949), Blue Hawaii (1961, co-starring Elvis Presley) and Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). She had a prominent supporting role in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate in which she portrayed the malicious Mrs. Iselin. She received acclaim for her performance, several industry awards and an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actress.^[29][30] Lansbury also starred in several dramas before and during her years of Broadway success, including The World of Henry Orient (1964) and Something for Everyone (1970).^[29]

Lansbury received her much coverage in the media because of her popularity from, and association with, Mame on Broadway in the 1960s. She used her fame to benefit humanitarian causes. For example, when appearing as a guest on the Sunday night CBS-TV show What's My Line?, she made a plea for viewers to contribute to the 1966 Muscular Dystrophy Association fund-raising drive, chaired by Jerry Lewis.^[31]

Lansbury in the trailer for The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945)

After many years performing mostly on the stage, Lansbury returned to film in Death on the Nile (1978) and then portrayed Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980). She began doing character voice work in the years that followed in animated films such as The Last Unicorn (1982) and Anastasia (1997), and as the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the 1991 Disney hit, Beauty and the Beast, in which she performed the title song.^[29] She reprised this role in Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas (1997) and in the video game Kingdom Hearts II (2006). Lansbury made her first theatrical film appearance since The Company of Wolves (1984) as Aunt Adelaide in Nanny McPhee in 2005.

Lansbury starred opposite Laurence Olivier in a BBC adaptation of the Broadway play, A Talent for Murder (1983), which she described as "a rushed job" in which she participated solely to work with Olivier.^[32] Afterwards, Lansbury continued to work in the mystery genre and achieved fame as mystery novelist Jessica Fletcher on the U.S. television series Murder, She Wrote (1984–96).^[29] It became one of the longest-running detective drama series in television history.^[33] She assumed ownership of the series and acted as executive producer for the last four seasons. Her brother Bruce became the supervising producer, her son Anthony and step-son David were executive producers, and her husband assisted in running the production company, Corymore Productions.^[33]

On July 5, 1986, she co-hosted (with Kirk Douglas) the New York Philharmonic's tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, which was televised live on ABC Television.^[34]

Although she was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she has never won; nor did she win any of the eighteen Emmy Awards for which she was nominated over a thirty-three-year period. She holds the record for the most Primetime Emmy losses by a performer,^[35] Reflecting on this in 2007, she stated that she was at first "terribly disappointed, but subsequently very glad that [she] did not win", because she believes that she would have otherwise had a less successful career.^[36] However, she has received Golden Globe^[37] and People's Choice awards for her television and film work.^[38]

Lansbury co-starred in Mr. Popper's Penguins, opposite Jim Carrey, released in June 2011.^[39] She is also scheduled to appear in another film, Adaline.^[40]

Writing[link]

She has written books including co-authoring, with Mimi Avins, Angela Lansbury's Positive Moves – My Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being (1990).^[41]

Personal life[link]

Lansbury with her children in 1957.

In 1945, Lansbury married American actor Richard Cromwell when he was 35 and she was 19. Cromwell was bisexual,^[42] and the marriage dissolved after a year, but the two reportedly remained friends. In 1949, Lansbury married British-born actor and businessman Peter Shaw. She had two children, Anthony Peter Shaw (born January 7, 1952) and Deidre Angela Shaw (born April 26, 1953). Shaw was instrumental in guiding and managing Lansbury's career. They were married for 54 years until his death in January 2003.^[43]

Lansbury became a naturalized US citizen in 1951.^[44]

She is the mother of two, stepmother of one and a grandmother. A fire destroyed the family's Malibu home in September 1970, prompting a move to a rural area of County Cork in Ireland.^[6] Her daughter and son-in-law, a chef, are restaurateurs in West Los Angeles.^[45] Her son Anthony Shaw, after a brief fling with acting, became producer/director of Murder, She Wrote and currently is a television executive and director.

Lansbury's half-sister Isolde was married to Peter Ustinov for some years, but they divorced in 1946.^[6] Lansbury and Ustinov appeared together once in Death on the Nile (1978). She is related by marriage to actress Ally Sheedy, ex-wife of her nephew David Lansbury.^[46] Both her brothers, twins Bruce and Edgar, are successful theatre producers: Edgar was instrumental in bringing Godspell to Broadway, and Bruce Lansbury was a television producer for such shows as The Wild Wild West and Mission: Impossible and Murder, She Wrote.

Lansbury was a long-time resident of Brentwood, a neighbourhood of Los Angeles, California, where she supported various philanthropies. She had knee-replacement surgery on July 14, 2005. She had two hip replacement surgeries.^[47] In 2006, she moved to New York City, purchasing a condominium at a reported cost of $2 million. The following year, she returned to Broadway in Deuce, opposite Marian Seldes.^[45] Lansbury's papers are housed at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center at Boston University.^[48]

Credits[link]

Filmography[link]

Theatre[link]

Bibliography[link]

Lansbury, Angela; Avins, Mimi (1990). Angela Lansbury's Positive Moves – My Personal Plan for Fitness and Well-Being. Delacorte Press (New York City). ISBN 978-0-385-30223-4.

Honors and awards[link]

Tony Awards[link]

Lansbury has won five Tony Awards, tying Julie Harris for the most any performer has received (although Harris has won six Tony Awards, one is a Special Tony Award):^[55]

• 1966 – Best Actress in a Musical for Mame
• 1969 – Best Actress in a Musical for Dear World
• 1975 – Best Actress in a Musical for Gypsy
• 1979 – Best Actress in a Musical for Sweeney Todd
• 2009 – Best Featured Actress in a Play for Blithe Spirit

In addition, she was nominated in 2007 for her leading role in the play Deuce for the Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Play^[56] and in 2010 for her featured role in the revival of the musical A Little Night Music for the Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.^[57][58]

Awards and recognition[link]

• Hasty Pudding Woman of the Year (1968)
• George and Ira Gershwin Award for Lifetime Musical Achievement, UCLA Spring Sing, 1988 ^[59]
• In 1994, Queen Elizabeth appointed her a Commander of the Order of the British Empire "for services to the dramatic arts."^[60]
• In 1995, she was given the Disney Legend award.^[61]
• In 1996, she was awarded the Women in Film Lucy Award in recognition of her excellence and innovation in her creative works that have enhanced the perception of women through the medium of television.^[62]
• Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award (1996)
• Television Critics Association Awards — Career Achievement Award (1996)
• In 1997, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts.^[63]
• She has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, one for film (North side of the 6600 block of Hollywood Boulevard) and one for television (West side of the 1500 block of Vine Street).^[64]
• She received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2000.^[65]
• The New Dramatists Lifetime Achievement Award (2000)^[66]
• The Acting Company's First Lifetime Achievement Award (2002).^[67]
• BAFTA Awards – Britannia Award for Lifetime Achievement (2003)
• The Actor's Fund of America Lifetime Achievement (2004)^[68]
• The Doctor of Humane Letters honoris causa degree from the University of Miami (2008). She was also the guest speaker at the commencement ceremony.^[69]
• Drama League Awards – The Unique Contribution to the Theatre Award (2009)
• Drama League Honors (2010)^[70]
• Signature Theatre Sondheim Award (2010)^[71]
• Honorary Chairman of the American Theatre Wing (2010)^[72]
• Inductee, Academy of Television Arts & Sciences Hall of Fame

See also[link]

	Biography portal
	Film portal
	Musical Theatre portal
	Theatre portal
	Television portal

• List of American film actresses
• List of American television actresses
• List of British actors and actresses
• List of people from Los Angeles
• List of people from New York City
• List of people from Tower Hamlets

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Edelman, Rob; Kupferberg, Audrey E. (1996). Angela Lansbury, A life on stage and screen. Secaucus, NJ: Carol Publishing Corporation. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/1-55972-327-5|1-55972-327-5]]. 
• Gottfried, Martin (1999). Balancing Act: The Authorized Biography of Angela Lansbury. New York: Little, Brown & Company. ISBN 0-316-32225-3. 

External links[link]

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Angela Lansbury

• Angela Lansbury at the Internet Broadway Database
• Angela Lansbury at the Internet Movie Database
• Angela Lansbury at the TCM Movie Database
• Angela Lansbury Archive of American Television Interview recorded 15 September 1998
• Angela Lansbury on American Theatre Wing's Downstage Center
• Angela Lansbury Collection at Boston University
• 2009 Michael Portantiere interview with Angela Lansbury by The Sondheim Review
• Literature on Angela Lansbury^{[dead link]}
• Angela Lansbury on TCM's Private Screenings with Robert Osborne

Barack Obama
44th President of the United States
Incumbent
Assumed office January 20, 2009
Vice President	Joe Biden
Preceded by	George W. Bush
United States Senator from Illinois
In office January 3, 2005 – November 16, 2008
Preceded by	Peter Fitzgerald
Succeeded by	Roland Burris
Member of the Illinois Senate from the 13th District
In office January 8, 1997 – November 4, 2004
Preceded by	Alice Palmer
Succeeded by	Kwame Raoul
Personal details
Born	Barack Hussein Obama II (1961-08-04) August 4, 1961 (age 50)[1] Honolulu, Hawaii, U.S.[2]
Political party	Democratic
Spouse(s)	Michelle Robinson (1992–present)
Children	Malia (born 1998) Sasha (born 2001)
Residence	White House (Official) Chicago, Illinois (Private)
Alma mater	Occidental College Columbia University (B.A.) Harvard Law School (J.D.)
Profession	Community organizer Lawyer Constitutional law professor Author
Religion	Christianity[3]
Awards	Nobel Peace Prize
Signature
Website	barackobama.com

	This article is part of a series on Barack Obama
Background Illinois Senate US Senate Political positions Public image Family 2008 primaries Obama–Biden campaign Transition Inauguration Electoral history Presidency Timeline '09 '10 '11 '12 First 100 days Nobel Peace Prize Re-election campaign

Barack Hussein Obama II (ⁱ/bəˈrɑːk huːˈseɪn oʊˈbɑːmə/; born August 4, 1961) is the 44th and current President of the United States. He is the first African American to hold the office. In January 2005, Obama was sworn in as a U.S. Senator in the state of Illinois. He would hold this office until November 2008, when he resigned following his victory in the 2008 presidential election.

Born in Honolulu, Hawaii, Obama is a graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, where he was the president of the Harvard Law Review. He was a community organizer in Chicago before earning his law degree. He worked as a civil rights attorney in Chicago and taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992 to 2004. He served three terms representing the 13th District in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004.

Following an unsuccessful bid against the Democratic incumbent for a seat in the United States House of Representatives in 2000, Obama ran for the United States Senate in 2004. Several events brought him to national attention during the campaign, including his victory in the March 2004 Illinois Democratic primary for the Senate election and his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004. He won election to the U.S. Senate in Illinois in November 2004. His presidential campaign began in February 2007, and after a close campaign in the 2008 Democratic Party presidential primaries against Hillary Rodham Clinton, he won his party's nomination. In the 2008 presidential election, he defeated Republican nominee John McCain, and was inaugurated as president on January 20, 2009. Nine months later, Obama was named the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. In April 2011, he announced that he would be running for re-election in 2012.

As president, Obama signed economic stimulus legislation in the form of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Tax Relief, Unemployment Insurance Reauthorization, and Job Creation Act of 2010. Other domestic policy initiatives include the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the Don't Ask, Don't Tell Repeal Act of 2010, and the Budget Control Act of 2011. In May 2012, he became the first sitting U.S. president to openly support legalizing same-sex marriage. In foreign policy, he ended the war in Iraq, increased troop levels in Afghanistan, signed the New START arms control treaty with Russia, ordered U.S. involvement in the 2011 Libya military intervention, and ordered the military operation that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.

Early life and career[link]

Obama was born on August 4, 1961, at Kapiʻolani Maternity & Gynecological Hospital (now Kapiʻolani Medical Center for Women and Children) in Honolulu, Hawaii,^[2][4][5] and is the first President to have been born in Hawaii.^[6] His mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was born in Wichita, Kansas, and was of mostly English ancestry,^[7] along with Scottish, Irish, German, and Swiss.^{[8][9][10][11][12]} His father, Barack Obama, Sr., was a Luo from Nyang’oma Kogelo, Nyanza Province, Kenya. Obama's parents met in 1960 in a Russian class at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where his father was a foreign student on scholarship.^[13][14] The couple married on February 2, 1961,^[15] separated when Obama Sr. went to Harvard University on scholarship, and divorced in 1964.^[13] Obama Sr. remarried and returned to Kenya, visiting Barack in Hawaii only once, in 1971. He died in an automobile accident in 1982.^[16]

After her divorce, Dunham married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, who was attending college in Hawaii. When Suharto, a military leader in Soetoro's home country, came to power in 1967, all Indonesian students studying abroad were recalled, and the family moved to the Menteng neighborhood of Jakarta.^[4][17] From ages six to ten, Obama attended local schools in Jakarta, including Besuki Public School and St. Francis of Assisi School.^[18]

In 1971, Obama returned to Honolulu to live with his maternal grandparents, Madelyn and Stanley Armour Dunham, and with the aid of a scholarship attended Punahou School, a private college preparatory school, from fifth grade until his graduation from high school in 1979.^[19] Obama's mother returned to Hawaii in 1972, remaining there until 1977 when she went back to Indonesia to work as an anthropological field worker. She finally returned to Hawaii in 1994 and lived there for one year before dying of ovarian cancer.^[15][20]

Of his early childhood, Obama recalled, "That my father looked nothing like the people around me—that he was black as pitch, my mother white as milk—barely registered in my mind."^[14] He described his struggles as a young adult to reconcile social perceptions of his multiracial heritage.^[21] Reflecting later on his years in Honolulu, Obama wrote: "The opportunity that Hawaii offered—to experience a variety of cultures in a climate of mutual respect—became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear."^[22] Obama has also written and talked about using alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine during his teenage years to "push questions of who I was out of my mind."^[23] At the 2008 Civil Forum on the Presidency, Obama described his high-school drug use as a great moral failure.^[24]

Following high school, Obama moved to Los Angeles in 1979 to attend Occidental College. In February 1981, he made his first public speech, calling for Occidental to divest from South Africa in response to its policy of apartheid.^[25] In mid-1981, Obama traveled to Indonesia to visit his mother and sister Maya, and visited the families of college friends in Pakistan and India for three weeks.^[25] Later in 1981, he transferred to Columbia University in New York City, where he majored in political science with a specialty in international relations^[26] and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1983. He worked for a year at the Business International Corporation,^[27] then at the New York Public Interest Research Group.^[28][29]

Chicago community organizer and Harvard Law School[link]

Two years after graduating, Obama was hired in Chicago as director of the Developing Communities Project (DCP), a church-based community organization originally comprising eight Catholic parishes in Roseland, West Pullman, and Riverdale on Chicago's South Side. He worked there as a community organizer from June 1985 to May 1988.^[29][30] He helped set up a job training program, a college preparatory tutoring program, and a tenants' rights organization in Altgeld Gardens.^[31] Obama also worked as a consultant and instructor for the Gamaliel Foundation, a community organizing institute.^[32] In mid-1988, he traveled for the first time in Europe for three weeks and then for five weeks in Kenya, where he met many of his paternal relatives for the first time.^[33] He returned to Kenya in August 2006 for a visit to his father's birthplace, a village near Kisumu in rural western Kenya.^[34]

In late 1988, Obama entered Harvard Law School. He was selected as an editor of the Harvard Law Review at the end of his first year,^[35] and president of the journal in his second year.^[31][36] During his summers, he returned to Chicago, where he worked as an associate at the law firms of Sidley Austin in 1989 and Hopkins & Sutter in 1990.^[37] After graduating with a J.D. magna cum laude^[38] from Harvard in 1991, he returned to Chicago.^[35] Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review gained national media attention^[31][36] and led to a publishing contract and advance for a book about race relations,^[39] which evolved into a personal memoir. The manuscript was published in mid-1995 as Dreams from My Father.^[39]