Angela Lansbury

At the age of 19, Angela Lansbury eloped with actor Richard Cromwell and married soon after in 1945. However, the marriage ended in divorce within a year. It has been reported that Cromwell was gay, which Lansbury was unaware of at the time of their marriage.

In 1949, she married actor Peter Shaw and lived together for over five decades till his death in 2003. They had two children, Anthony and Deirdre, both of whom later became part of the anti-establishment movement and started using recreational drugs. Anthony later became a television director, while Deirdre opened a restaurant.

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925, in Regent's Park, Central London, to actress Moyna Macgill and timber merchant Edgar Lansbury. Her father became a politician, following her grandfather George Lansbury, who was the leader of the British Labour Party and an anti-war activist. She was devastated after her father died from stomach cancer when she was nine.

She attended South Hampstead High School from 1934 to 1939, but was largely self-educated, learning from books, theatre and cinema.

In 1940, she began taking acting classes at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington, West London.

After the death of her grandfather in 1940, her mother moved to United States to escape the Blitz. In the US, she gained a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing and started studying at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, from where she graduated in 1942.

Back in Britain, she had appeared onstage for the first time in a school production of Maxwell Anderson's 'Mary of Scotland'. In the US, she initially appeared in performances of William Congreve's 'The Way of the World' and Oscar Wilde's 'Lady Windermere's Fan'.

Angela Lansbury started her career in 1942, at the age of 16, as a nightclub act at the Samovar Club, Montreal. She pretended to be 19 years old and earned $60 a week singing Noël Coward songs.

She soon met John van Druten, one of the screenplay writers of the film version of 'Gaslight', at a party hosted by her mother. He recommended her for the role of Nancy Oliver, a conniving cockney maid, in the 1944 movie. She charmed the critics as well as the audience with her debut film role and earned an Academy Award nomination for 'Best Supporting Actress'.

She hired an agent and signed a seven-year deal with MGM. In 1944, she acted alongside Elizabeth Taylor in the commercially successful film 'National Velvet'. The next year, she starred in the film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel 'The Picture of Dorian Gray'. The film did not do well commercially, but her performance earned her a Golden Globe award and her second Oscar nomination.

Throughout the next decade, she appeared in a number of MGM productions, including 'The Harvey Girls' (1946), 'State of the Union' (1948), and 'The Three Musketeers' (1948). She was often cast in evil roles, sometimes playing characters much older than her, which led her to end her contract with MGM and move back to stage productions.

She debuted on Broadway in 1957, playing Marcel Cat in the play 'Hotel Paradiso'. She received critical acclaim for her role and went on to feature in another Broadway production in 1960, 'A Taste of Honey'.

Angela Lansbury's major film roles include 'Gaslight', 'The Picture of Dorian Gray', and 'The Manchurian Candidate'. Her portrayal of the witch Miss Eglantine Price in 'Bedknobs and Broomsticks' is one of her most popular roles.

She became a household name after she started to appear on the television series 'Murder, She Wrote'. The series was so popular that she eventually started to produce the show, which ran for 12 consecutive seasons.