Angela Lansbury DVDs

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Angela Brigid Lansbury, CBE (born 16 October 1925) is an English actress and singer whose career has spanned six decades. She made her first film appearance in Gaslight (1944), for which she received an Academy Award nomination, and expanded her repertoire to Broadway and television in the 1950s. Highly respected for her versatility, Lansbury has won four Tony Awards and six Golden Globes, and has been nominated for eighteen Emmys and three Academy Awards.

Her more popular films include The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and Beauty and the Beast (1991) and she was successful in such Broadway musicals as Gypsy, Mame and Sweeney Todd. Lansbury is more recently known for her role as mystery writer Jessica Fletcher on the American television series Murder, She Wrote, in which she starred from 1984 until 1996.

Lansbury has enjoyed a long and varied career, often in roles generally older than her actual age, appearing in everything from Samson and Delilah (1949) to Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). She appeared as Alvera Dunlear in the 1963 episode "Something Crazy's Going on in the Back Room" episode of the NBC medical drama about psychiatry, The Eleventh Hour. A notable film was The Manchurian Candidate (1962) in which she played Mrs. Iselin, the cold-blooded mother of a war veteran brainwashed into becoming a Communist assassin. She won much critical praise for her performance, and received her third Oscar nomination. (Lucille Ball had been considered for the role; a decade later, Ball coincidentally landed the title role in the film version of Mame, the role Lansbury had created on Broadway.) On CNN's Larry King Live, Lansbury said that her character in The Manchurian Candidate was her favorite of her many film roles.

Lansbury's popularity from and association with Mame on Broadway in the '60s had her very much in demand everywhere in the media. Ever the humanitarian, she used her fame as an opportunity to benefit others wherever possible. For example, when appearing as a guest panelist on the popular Sunday night CBS-TV show, What's My Line?, she made an impassioned plea for viewers to contribute to the 1966 Muscular Dystrophy Association fundraising drive, chaired by Jerry Lewis.

After many years focused on the theatre, Lansbury returned to film, playing Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978). She was somewhat less successful as Agatha Christie's Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980).

Lansbury then turned to character voice work in animated films like The Last Unicorn (1982) and as the Dowager Empress in the animated film Anastasia in 1997. Her most famous voice work was the singing teapot Mrs. Potts in the Disney hit Beauty and the Beast (1991), who performed the Oscar-winning title song written by Alan Menken and Howard Ashman. She reprised the role in "Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas" (1997), and again in the Disney/Square-Enix video game Kingdom Hearts II in 2006. In the same year, she appeared in Nanny McPhee as great aunt Adelaide.

While Lansbury has won every Tony for which she's been nominated, with the exception of her nomination for Deuce in 2007, she has been less successful with the Oscars and Emmys. The Oscar has always eluded her, and Lansbury holds the record for the most primetime Emmy nominations (twelve) as Best Actress without a single win. Yet, she is the recipient of several other prominent awards, including the People's Choice and Golden Globe.

Lansbury found her biggest success and a worldwide following as Jessica Fletcher in the long-running television series, Murder, She Wrote (1984 - 1996), which was one of the longest running detective drama series in US TV history and made her one of the highest paid actresses in the world. Lansbury also assumed ownership of the series in 1991 and acted as executive producer of the series from that season onwards.

In 1983 Lansbury starred opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in a BBC adaptation of the Broadway play A Talent for Murder. According to The Complete Films of Laurence Olivier (Author Jerry Vermilye, Publisher Citadel), Lansbury later stated that the production was "a rushed job", and her only reason for participating was the opportunity to work/team up with Sir Laurence Olivier.