Lansbury won an Oscar nomination for her first role in the 1944 film Gaslight, and gained international acclaim as Murder, She Wrote’s Jessica Fletcher
• Angela Lansbury: the sweet, scene-stealing grande dame of our screens for 75 years
The actor Angela Lansbury, best known as Jessica Fletcher in the TV series Murder, She Wrote and for numerous film and theatre roles, has died aged 96. She died in her sleep on Tuesday, just five days before her 97th birthday, her family has announced.
Lansbury was born in London in 1925, to Irish actor Moyna Macgill and Edgar Lansbury, a politician and timber merchant who died when she was nine. Following the Blitz, Lansbury, two of her siblings and her mother relocated to the US, where she trained at New York’s Feagin School of Drama and Radio. She went on to receive an Oscar nomination for her first film role, aged 19, in the 1944 film Gaslight, and starred in the hit film National Velvet, as well as a steady stream of other MGM productions during the 1940s.
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