Angela Lansbury, who achieved widespread fame because the star of the long-running CBS sequence “Homicide, She Wrote” and was the recipient of six Tony Awards (together with an honorary one bestowed this 12 months), was by no means to be confused with another performer. A royal in exile, astringently self-possessed, her syllables arrayed like nice china, she was without delay immediately recognizable and readily transformable.

Lansbury, who died on Tuesday at age 96, didn’t disappear into her roles, however she may play something. She was as a lot a personality actor as she was a star.

In 2014, when writing a profile of Lansbury, I requested Stephen Sondheim for his ideas on one in every of his most distinguished interpreters. He was away in London and missed my deadline for the piece, however I preserved his pithy remarks: “It’s onerous to jot down about her with out sounding like her agent. Suffice it to say that each playwright ought to have her of their play and each theater songwriter ought to have her of their musical.”

The daughter of an prosperous English timber service provider and politician who died when she was 9, Lansbury was simply a teen when she signed a contract at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer after having left Britain together with her actor mom and brothers throughout World Conflict II. She was promoting cosmetics at a Los Angeles division retailer on the time to assist assist her household when studio boss Louis B. Mayer, impressed together with her display check, took a shine to her.

Employed as a pretty utility participant and positioned on the MGM meeting line, she was forged in supporting roles in “Gaslight” and “The Image of Dorian Grey,” incomes Oscar nominations for her work in each movies. She was Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in “Nationwide Velvet,” a saloon singer rival of Judy Garland’s in “The Harvey Ladies” and a part of a love triangle with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in “State of the Union.”

Working alongside Hollywood’s largest stars was each an schooling and a supply of frustration for Lansbury. Solid in components that didn’t at all times really feel like an excellent match, she noticed that the studio had consigned her to the second tier. She longed for the stage, having studied drama when she arrived within the U.S. by a scholarship from the American Theatre Wing. However she had a household to assist, and after she left MGM on the finish of her contract, she began showing usually on tv all through the Fifties.

Curiously, it was after one in every of her most indelible movie performances, enjoying the treacherous mom within the 1962 traditional “The Manchurian Candidate,” that she determined it was time to pursue her dream of musical theater. The prospect of being typecast by Hollywood as a maternal terror galvanized her to motion. As Lansbury defined after I interviewed her at her Brentwood house in 2014, “You’ll be able to’t reside down a component like that. I made a decision, ‘Overlook it. I’m going to sing now. I’m going to make you cheerful by singing.’”

She starred on Broadway within the Sondheim flop “Anybody Can Whistle,” which closed shortly after it opened. Enjoying the zany but villainously corrupt “Mayoress” Cora Hoover Hooper, Lansbury had little interest in reprising a model of her character from “The Manchurian Candidate.”

She recalled a number of screaming matches with book-writer and director Arthur Laurents, who turned a staunch good friend. To make issues worse, she harm her voice singing the half. However this inauspicious launch of her Broadway musical profession could be eclipsed by the large success she was to have two years later within the Jerry Herman musical “Mame.”

Enjoying the title position of the extravagantly glamorous New York bohemian who finds herself all of a sudden saddled with a child, Lansbury received the primary of her Tony Awards. However one thing extra vital was gained: The revered utility participant had turn out to be a bona fide Broadway star. It doesn’t matter what else she did — and there could be way more — she would ceaselessly be acknowledged as a top-tier expertise.

In a 1985 tv interview with Barbara Walters, Lansbury recalled “humbling” herself to get the half. “It’s the one time in my profession that I’ve finished that, and I did it for ‘Mame’ as a result of I knew ‘Mame’ was the important thing that may unlock a complete new profession for me and get me out of this type of doldrums of cameo components that I used to be locked into for thus a few years.”

Lansbury would win her second Tony for her efficiency in “Expensive World,” a short-lived Herman musical that was a comedown from the dizzying heights of “Mame.” However Broadway lightning struck once more a number of years later with the 1974 revival of “Gypsy.”

Getting into the infamous stage mom position that Ethel Merman originated, Lansbury knew that she couldn’t compete together with her predecessor’s uncooked theatrical energy. So as an alternative she dug into the character’s dramatic complexities. Working once more with book-writer and director Laurents, she delivered a “Rose’s Flip” that was without delay a seismic 11 o’clock quantity and a full-scale nervous breakdown.

Lansbury’s capacity to be each broad and refined, bigger than life but unmistakably human, was indispensable in introducing the world to “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Road.” Critics had been initially respectful however filled with doubts about this bloody, Brechtian musical thriller by Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler. Lansbury, who by this time had turn out to be broadly beloved for casting spells within the 1971 Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks,” introduced out the comedy with out undercutting the horror. She delivered the Grand Guignol with a wink that was all of the extra disturbing for being so eccentrically amusing.

It’s Lansbury’s character, Mrs. Lovett, the proprietor of a seedy bakeshop, who proposes to Sweeney, the vengeful barber able to slice throats along with his razor, that one thing culinary may very well be finished with all of the lifeless our bodies he plans to rack up. When the thought happens to her that these corpses would make an excellent filling for her meat pies, she treats the matter like a wonderfully cheap enterprise resolution earlier than giddily imagining the cannibal selection she’ll be capable of supply her clients.

You’ll be able to see the lightbulb go off in Lansbury’s head within the efficiency that was filmed for tv on the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as she launches into “A Little Priest,” the hilariously macabre quantity during which she and Sweeney record the pies in accordance with the sufferer’s career. Lansbury’s cockney squawks and daft, diabolical music corridor thrives delighted an viewers who had been prepared to go wherever she was ready to take them, even when it meant imagining “shepherd’s pie peppered with precise shepherd on prime!”

Sondheim’s ingenious insanity discovered the perfect singing character actor. A superb theatrical technician able to juggling cleverness with clowning, she honored Sondheim’s wildly unique lyrics together with her personal musical precision whereas making the outlandish situation fiendishly entertaining.

Lansbury’s nice present was her capacity to enter right into a storybook actuality, no matter medium, and place her abilities on the service of narrative. She wasn’t shy of the highlight, however then she realized from her MGM days the facility of a star to promote an phantasm.

After I interviewed her, she was gearing as much as reprise her Tony-winning Broadway efficiency because the eccentric spiritualist Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit” on the Ahmanson Theatre. She was 89 and dedicated to working, even when it meant carrying an earpiece to remain on cue. Her honorary Oscar stood inconspicuously among the many bric-a-brac. The longer term was her chief concern.

Lansbury’s relationship together with her viewers was treasured to her. After 12 seasons of coming into the dwelling rooms of viewers because the thriller writer-turned-detective Jessica Fletcher on “Homicide, She Wrote,” the sequence that started in 1984, she needed to protect the particular connection that TV uniquely supplies. Worldwide syndication of the sequence, to say nothing of her voice-over efficiency as Mrs. Potts within the 1991 Disney animated movie “Magnificence and the Beast,” solely strengthened her need to offer again to her rising intergenerational legion of followers.

A consummate skilled when performing, she was comfy in her personal pores and skin when out of the highlight. Happy with her British heritage, Irish roots and American house, she embraced her previous, the tragedies in addition to the triumphs, with the identical clear-eyed aplomb with which she approached her limitless vary of characters all through her lengthy and exemplary profession.