Angela Lansbury

Angela Lansbury made her film debut in Gaslight in 1944, before she turned twenty, and gave her last screen performance as herself in Glass Onion in 2022, the year she died. Born in London in 1925, she held three nationalities, British, American and Irish, and worked for eighty years across stage and screen, collecting six Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, an Olivier, nominations for three Academy Awards and eighteen Primetime Emmys, a Kennedy Center Honor, the National Medal of the Arts, an Academy Honorary Award and a damehood.

The studio years cast her older than she was and discovered she was far better at malice than at sweetness. She is the insolent young maid in Gaslight, Sibyl Vane in The Picture of Dorian Gray, the queen in The Three Musketeers, Semadar in Samson and Delilah, and then, still in her thirties, the mother in The Manchurian Candidate, which remains one of the most frightening performances in American film.

The second act was warmth, and it was a deliberate turn: Miss Price in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile, Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd, Mommy Fortuna in The Last Unicorn, Granny in The Company of Wolves. In 1984, four years after playing Marple, she began Murder, She Wrote and stayed Jessica Fletcher so long that the character outlasted the series in four television films running to 2003.

The third act was her voice. Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast and its 1997 follow-up, the Dowager Empress in Anastasia, host of Fantasia 2000, Mayor McGerkle in The Grinch, with live-action returns in Nanny McPhee, Mr. Popper's Penguins, Little Women and Mary Poppins Returns.