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“And then a slew of roles in miniseries, and I began to sense that the television audience was very receptive to me, and I decided I should stop flirting and shut the door or say to my agents, ‘I’m ready to think series.'” “But the year 1983 rolled around and Broadway was not forthcoming, so I took a part in a miniseries, Gertrude Whitney in Little Gloria, Happy at Last. “I couldn’t imagine I would ever want to do television,” Lansbury said in a 1985 interview with The New York Times.

The pair earlier had created Ellery Queen, another show about a crime-solving writer, and former All in the Family star Jean Stapleton had already turned them down.

WATCH MURDER SHE WROTE MOVIES SERIES

In the early 1980s, Lansbury was not interested in headlining a TV series when she was approached by Columbo creators Richard Levinson and William Link to star in Murder, She Wrote. In June, she received yet another Tony, this one for lifetime achievement. She was still on the road in Blithe Spirit as she approached her 90th birthday, and in December 2018 she was back on the big screen, as the Balloon Lady, in Mary Poppins Returns. Lovett in the original 1979 production of Stephen Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd and, in 2009, for portraying the clairvoyant Madame Arcati in a revival of the Noël Coward farce Blithe Spirit. She followed with wins for playing “the madwoman of Chaillot” in 1969’s Dear World, with music and lyrics by Jerry Herman for starring as the ultimate stage mother Rose in a 1974 revival of Gypsy for dazzling as the off-the-wall Mrs. Her charismatic performance as the eccentric title character in a 1966 production of Mame vaulted her to Broadway superstardom and resulted in the first of her four Tonys for best actress in a musical. The actress often played characters much older than herself, and in this case, Harvey was just a few years younger than Lansbury.

Lansbury then took a turn toward evil and was rewarded with her final Oscar nom for portraying Laurence Harvey’s manipulative mother in the Cold War classic The Manchurian Candidate (1962). (Her mother, West End actress Moyna MacGill, played a duchess in the film.) The London-born Lansbury, then 19, received a best supporting actress Oscar nom for her very first film role, as the young maid Nancy in the home of Charles Boyer and his new bride Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).įor her third movie, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), she received another nom for playing the lovely singer whose heart is broken by the hedonistic title character. George Riddle, Actor on 'The Onion News Network' and 'The Fantasticks,' Dies at 86

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