ANGELA LANSBURY - LARRY KING LIVE, 2004

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• published: 03 Jun 2017
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Thanks to Ryan Reid for reminding me... NOTE: See my posting of Angela, Honoree at Kennedy Center Honors. Also note that below Wikipedia says that she had two brothers, Bruce and Edgar, who were twins - but in either this interview or the one with Barbara Walters, she says that one of her brothers was HER twin! I'll look again and let you know where I saw that OR if you see it, let me know. Thanks Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury, DBE (born 16 October 1925) is a British-American-Irish actress who has appeared in theatre, television and film, as well as a producer, voice actress, singer, and songwriter. Her career has spanned seven decades, much of it in the United States, and her work has attracted international attention. Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of actress Moyna Macgill and politician Edgar Lansbury. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States with her mother and two younger brothers, and studied acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed to MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in eleven further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finest performances. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her a range of awards and established her as a gay icon. Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland, in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons from 1984 until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, thereby contributing to animated films such as Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991). Since then, she has toured in a variety of international theatrical productions and continued to make occasional film appearances. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in a ceremony at Windsor Castle for "services to drama, charitable work, and philanthropy." Lansbury has received an Honorary Oscar and has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, an Olivier Award, and one Grammy Award. She has also been nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on eighteen occasions. She has been the subject of three biographies. Lansbury was born to an upper middle class family on October 16, 1925. Although her birthplace has often been given as Poplar, East London, she has rejected this, asserting that while she had ancestral connections to Poplar, she was born in Regent's Park, Central London. Her mother was Belfast-born actress Moyna Macgill (born Charlotte Lillian McIldowie), who regularly appeared on stage in the West End and who had also starred in several films. Her father was the wealthy English timber merchant and politician Edgar Lansbury, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and former mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar. Her paternal grandfather was the Labour Party leader and anti-war activist George Lansbury, a man whom she felt "awed" by and considered "a giant in my youth."Angela had an older half sister, Isolde, who was the offspring of Moyna's previous marriage to writer and director Reginald Denham. In January 1930, when Angela was four, her mother gave birth to twin boys, Bruce and Edgar, leading the Lansburys to move from their Poplar flat to a house in Mill Hill, North London; on weekends they would vacate to a rural farm in Berrick Salome, Oxfordshire. The above information courtesy of Wikipedia. See that site for more on Angela's life and career.