Dame Angela Lansbury: All Important Information with Explanation!

Lansbury was born in Central London to an upper-middle-class family, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. She emigrated to the United States in 1940 to escape the Blitz and studied acting in New York City.

In 1942, she moved to Hollywood and signed with MGM, where she landed her first film roles in Gaslight (1944), National Velvet (1944), and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), garnering her two Academy Award nominations and a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

She went on to feature in eleven more MGM films, generally in minor roles, and once her contract expired in 1952, she began supplementing her film career with stage appearances. Despite being considered a B-list celebrity at the time, her performance in The Manchurian Candidate (1962) gained considerable acclaim and is frequently acknowledged as one of her career-best performances, garnering her a third Academy Award nomination and another Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress.

Dame Angela Lansbury Early Life

Lansbury’s father died of stomach cancer when she was nine years old, and she turned to act as a coping strategy.  Facing financial difficulties, her mother married a Scottish colonel, Leckie Forbes, and moved into his Hampstead home, where Lansbury attended South Hampstead High School from 1934 to 1939.

Nonetheless, she regarded herself to be primarily self-educated, having learned from literature, theatre, and cinema.  She became a self-described “total movie junkie,” going to the movies on a regular basis and envisioning herself as various characters.

She began studying acting at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art in Kensington, West London, in 1940, after temporarily studying music at the Ritman School of Dancing. She first appeared onstage as a lady-in-waiting in the school’s production of Maxwell Anderson’s Mary of Scotland.

Angela’s grandfather died that year, and with the outbreak of the Blitz, Macgill chose to accompany Angela, Bruce, and Edgar to America; Isolde remained in Britain with her new husband, actor Peter Ustinov. Macgill landed a job supervising 60 British youngsters being evacuated to North America onboard the Duchess of Atholl, landing in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, with them in mid-August.

 She then took a train to New York City, where she was financially sponsored by a Wall Street businessman, Charles T. Smith, and moved in with his family in Mahopac, New York.  Lansbury obtained an American Theatre Wing scholarship that allowed her to study at the Feagin School of Drama and Radio, where she appeared in productions of William Congreve’s The Way of the World and Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere’s Fan. She graduated in March 1942, by which time the family had relocated to a flat on Morton Street in Greenwich Village, Manhattan, New York City.

Dame Angela Lansbury Career

Macgill landed a role in a Canadian touring production of Tonight at 8.30, and she was accompanied in Canada by her daughter, who landed her first theatrical job as a nightclub act at Montreal’s Samovar Club. She got the job by pretending to be 19 when she was 16, and her act consisted of her singing Noel Coward songs for $60 a week.

In August 1942, she returned to New York City, but her mother had relocated to Hollywood, Los Angeles, to relaunch her film career; Lansbury and her brothers followed. Lansbury and her mother moved into a home in Laurel Canyon and got Christmas jobs at the Bullocks Wilshire department store in Los Angeles; Moyna was fired for ineptitude, leaving the family to survive on Lansbury’s $28 weekly salary.

Lansbury became acquainted with the city’s underground gay scene after befriending a number of gay men, and she and her mother attended lectures by the spiritual leader Jiddu Krishnamurti, where she met Aldous Huxley.

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