Award-Winning Actor And Gay Icon Angela Lansbury Dies, Aged 96
Award-winning movie and stage actor and gay icon, Angela Lansbury, has passed away at the age of 96, five days before her 97th birthday. She is best known for playing crime-solving mystery writer Jessica Fletcher in the crime mystery series Murder, She Wrote, for which she received 11 Emmy nominations.Lansbury also starred in numerous films such as The Portrait of Dorian Gray and The Manchurian Candidate, winning Golden Globes for both. In 1971 she starred in Disney’s Bedknobs and Broomsticks endearing herself to a generation of children. Lansbury’s breakout role came at the age of 19 when she acted in the psychological thriller, Gaslight, for which she received her first Oscar nomination.She made her Broadway debut in 1957 and over the course of her stage career was awarded five Tony Awards for roles in such plays as Mame and Blithe Spirit. In 1945, Lansbury married actor Richard Cromwell. The marriage only lasted a year on the account of Cromwell being gay.In a 2017 interview with Radio Times, Lansbury recalled, “I had no idea that I was marrying a gay man,”“I found him such an attractive individual, a very glamorous person – he knew everybody, he was a friend of Joan Crawford’s, these people who I was fascinated by as a young actress.