Angela Lansbury's most memorable—and surprising—roles

It may not be the role that challenged Lansbury the most, but was certainly the one that endeared her to the largest and most devoted audience and earned her a place in the television pantheon. As the stylish, sensible and keenly observant former educator turned bestselling mystery novelist and oft-reluctant but always committed amateur detective, Jessica Fletcher became Lansbury’s signature role. Her crisp intelligence, casually sophisticated yet down-to-earth charms, and the inherent likability of a favorite elder relative bolstered the show’s usually cleverly plotted whodunnit-of-the-week formula. Whether she was solving cases in the unusually homicide-prone town of Cabot Cove, Maine, or globetrotting around the world getting various wrongly accused nieces and nephews out of hot water, over the course of 12 seasons, Lansbury crafted one of the most indelible and distinctively original TV sleuths of all time—and introduced Coastal Grandma chic along the way.

In a vocal performance that will assuredly endure and delight new audiences for generations to come, Lansbury’s warm, nurturing and motherly Mrs. Potts in is the ideal grounding point for arguably the finest of Disney’s latter-day animation triumphs. Amid the (family-friendly) scariness of the Beast’s castle, her presence is a comfort for both Belle and small viewers, and humanizes the Beast’s plight with her deep-felt empathy. Best of all, Lansbury gets to unleash those Broadway-tested singing skills on not one but two All-Timers in the Disney music Hall of Fame, “Be Our Guest” and “Beauty And The Beast (Tale As Old As Time),” which alone cements her legacy as a singular talent of her time.

If any proof is needed of Lansbury’s range and versatility to counter her TV image, look no further than her Oscar-nominated performance in as Eleanor Iselin, easily her finest screen acting work, in filmmaker John Frankenheimer’s classic thriller fueled by Cold War paranoia. In reality, just three years older than Lawrence Harvey—the actor who plays her son, a sleeper assassin via psychotropic programming—Lansbury is utterly convincing both as an overattentive, uber-controlling, image-conscious political matriarch and in her hidden role as a ruthless secret agent willing to sacrifice her own flesh and blood at the altar of her own ambitions. Layer in creepy incestuous subtext and you have a performance for the ages, one even Meryl Streep couldn’t equal in the remake.

Although she would later excel in matriarchal roles, in , her film debut, 18-year-old Lansbury is perfectly on point as the saucy young Cockney maid Nancy, who serves as the receptive target of master of the house Charles Boyer’s flirtations, both covert and blatant, much to the chagrin of his wife, Ingrid Bergman. This is, of course, the fulcrum point for his denials and increasing suggestion that Bergman is imagining things to the point of paranoid insanity as he plots against her—thus did the title of the film lead to the creation of the contemporary psychological term “gaslighting,” much employed these days.

Would that the ultimate of her many triumphs on the stage was turned into a Lansbury-led film in her heyday, but thankfully there is a recorded 1982 performance of Stephen Sondheim’s macabre Broadway musical, with Lansbury—way, way out of the familiar territory of her later years—in the role she originated: the bloodthirsty Victorian-era meat pie shop proprietress Mrs. Lovett, the accomplice/maybe-lover of the titular barber-turned-serial killer. This is Angela Lansbury Unleashed, in acting and in song, playing one of the stage’s most bizarre, unconventional, and deliciously evil characters, the role for which she won her fourth Tony.

Beauty And The Beast isn’t the only reason Lansbury is a Disney Legend: she also headlined—in the thick of her glorious second act as a star of musical theater—the cult classic . It was long on Walt Disney’s radar as a potential live-action/animation hybrid, postponed in favor of Mary Poppins but revived shortly after his death. As the enchanted bedknob-wielding Eglantine Price, also a magical songstress charged with overseeing children, Lansbury employs witchcraft to battle the Nazis during wartime while keeping the kiddos safe in the anthropomorphic, soccer-loving land of Naboombu. It’s a rather oddball confection in the Disney canon, but it does offer Lansbury ample opportunity to sing lesser-known songs by Walt’s musical muses the Sherman Brothers.

In the late ’50s and early ’60s, Lansbury wasn’t always being offered top-flight material, but she did get to appear in a huge box office hit and share the screen with Elvis Presley in , the first of the superstar’s Hawaiian-set film vehicles. As Sarah Lee, the adoring but status-obsessed mother to Elvis’ just-out-of-the-Army surfer—though Presley was actually just ten years her junior—Lansbury has a field day with her Southern accent as she constantly tries to convince her son not to enter the family business and follow his own path. It’s a comic high point in one of Presley’s typically lightweight movie efforts. If only someone had thought to have Lansbury and the King duet in a musical number …

In , easily one of the most beloved family films of all time, Lansbury manages to swipe a few scenes from tween-age actor Elizabeth Taylor, whom the movie would launch into superstardom. Playing the slightly shallow, boy-crazy older sister to Taylor’s horse-obsessed Velvet, Lansbury—still a teen herself—delivers a deftly spot-on take on the disapproving, self-centered eldest sibling who nevertheless has a soft spot for the little sister whose passion for thoroughbreds she doesn’t quite understand.

Taking on the role of the Balloon Lady, initially conceived for original Poppins star Julie Andrews (who demurred, not wanting to detract from the new Poppins, Emily Blunt), Lansbury’s cameo in is itself practically perfect in every way, a delightful and unexpected surprise that plays wonderfully as she dispenses much-needed wisdom to the Banks family, while simultaneously reminding audiences of the actress’ own rich Disney legacy. Best of all, she gets to headline the cast’s song “Nowhere To Go But Up.”

Lansbury’s connection to Agatha Christie runs deeper than her starring role as Miss Marple in a film adaptation of The Mirror Crack’d, which set the table for her mystery-solving role on Murder, She Wrote. Her turn as Salome Otterbourne in is the anti-Jessica Fletcher, an alcoholic romance novelist with a flamboyant personality, dwindling readership, and mounting legal problems. She’s also a murder suspect rather than a sleuth, with Christie’s master detective Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) poised to ferret out her guilt or innocence—unless death finds her first. It’s as wonderfully over-the-top as it sounds, and Lansbury gooses the film’s energy every time she’s on screen.

In the 1960s, movie stars guest-starring on fanciful TV shows with high pop appeal was all the rage, and Lansbury followed the trend with an appearance on an episode of the tongue-in-cheek spy series titled “The Deadly Toys Affair,” playing the extravagantly outfitted movie star Elfie van Donck, the aunt of a young genius with a penchant for making lethal playthings whom U.N.C.L.E. hopes to recruit. Airing a year before her smash stint on Broadway, it’s something of a precursor to her Tony-winning role in “Mame.”

For decades, countless actors have found guest-starring roles in the Law & Order franchise on their way to bigger and better stardom, but this 2005 crossover of Law & Order: SVU and Law & Order: Trial By Jury—titled “Night” and “Day,” respectively—brought in Lansbury as its big gun. She plays Eleanor Duvall, a wealthy, iron-willed woman determined to keep her mentally challenged, serial rapist son from facing justice. Lansbury’s Emmy-nominated performance recalls the chilling, single-minded cold-bloodedness of The Manchurian Candidate—with a dose of Benson and Stabler on the side!