Births on October 16

Angela Lansbury, English-American actress, singer, and producer

Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury (born 16 October 1925) is an Irish-British actress and singer who has played many film, theatre, and television roles. Her career has spanned over 80 years, much of it in the United States; her work has received much international attention as well. Lansbury is one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. Over her distinguished career Lansbury has received an Honorary Academy Award, a BAFTA Fellowship, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. She has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She has also been nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on 18 occasions, and a Grammy Award. In 2000 she received the Kennedy Center Honor. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II.Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States, there studying acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed to MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in 11 further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finer performances. For her performance she received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture and her third Academy Award nomination. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury acted in several shows including Stephen Sondheim's Anyone Can Whistle in 1964. She finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her her first Tony Award and established her as a gay icon.

Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television in 1984, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, contributing to animated films like Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Don Bluth's Anastasia (1997).

In 2007 she made her return to Broadway theatre acting alongside Marian Seldes in the Terrance McNally Deuce. She then starred in the revival of the Noël Coward comedy Blithe Spirit for which she appeared on the Broadway, and West End stage earning her fifth Tony Award and her first Laurence Olivier Award. Since then, she has continued working on the Broadway stage in A Little Night Music in 2009, The Best Man in 2012, and has toured in a variety of international productions including Driving Miss Daisy. She has also continued to make occasional film and television appearances such as Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018). She has been the subject of three biographies.