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Every generation alive today has had its own Angela Lansbury.
The following year, Angela, her two brothers, and her mother fled England for New York.
Her experience of pretending to be older came in handy.
(She returned the favor, later saying, The theater always came first.
Movies were incidental.)
It was Lansburys dream role, and it made her an icon.
She wason the cover ofLifein backless gold pajamas!
I stopped playing bitches on wheels and peoples mothers.
I had only a few more years to kick up my heels, said Lansbury.
But she pushed hard for composers and writers to admit her to their creative process.
But I came to understand what it means from their point of view.
Angie would question a line or an emotion or an attitude and say, This seems inconsistent.
And if I agreed with her, I changed it.
I mean, thats what you do with actors, right?
Sixty percent of the best plays in history have been written by actors.
Theres a reason for that.
The one she took wasMurder, She Wrote.Its difficult to imagine now the scale of its success.
Lansbury was its key.
To play her, Lansbury put away her high-kicking music-hall theatricality and converted herself into pure relatability.
Its the kind of role that, for all its gentleness, feels ahead of our time.
The show is still beloved, a comforting haven of ontological order and self-confidence.
In the shows final five years, Lansbury took over as executive producer.
(Lansbury kept her family tightly around her after some early brushes with disaster in the 1960s.
At one point, to rescue her children, Lansbury moved the family briefly to Ireland.)
In a 2007 interview with the New YorkTimes,she sounded over it.
Her indomitability became part of her legend.
These celebrations mattered to her, as did the recognition of other artists.
But she advised them to remember this room … when we are all together as one.
