Fans of classic television were left saddened this week when they learned that legendary actress Angela Lansbury passed away.
According to the Washington Examiner, news of Lansbury’s death was made public on Tuesday via a statement released by her children.
Lansbury’s death came just one week before she would have turned 97
“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 AM today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” it read.
The Examiner noted that Lansbury was most famous for playing writer Jessica Fletcher on CBS’s “Murder, She Wrote,” which ran from 1984 to 1996.
The actress once explained during an interview with the Academy for American television how she ended up in the role.
“I made the decision that I wanted to get into television,” Lansbury recalled. “I was coming up to being 60 years old and I was really tired.”
“I didn’t think I was right for the role at all”
“I thought that the ‘Murder, She Wrote’ idea was interesting because it was a woman who was a sleuth, she was a detective,” the actress explained.
“She was kind of a plain, ordinary country woman who was widowed and who took up writing and she wrote mystery stories and in the course of her daily life she took up sleuthing,” Lansbury continued.
“So, I came out to the coast and the first person I saw was Norman Lear and I was taken to his office at Universal and he introduced me to Charles Durning and we kind of read through a scene,” she said.
“I left that meeting very unsure about what I was getting into there, I didn’t think I was right for the role at all,” Lansbury admitted. However, she later decided that “this lady, Mrs. Fletcher, was the one that I felt that I could bring something to.”
In addition to acting on “Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury appeared in a number of movies, including lending her voice to the 1991 animated Disney film “Beauty and the Beast.”
Originally from the United Kingdom, Lansbury was made a ‘Dame Commander’ by Queen Elizabeth II in 2014.