She stood in front of the camera for 75 years. She was nominated three times for an Oscar and several times for the Emmy TV award. She has won six Golden Globe trophies and five Tony Awards for her stage performances. Last June, when film, television and stage icon Angela Lansbury turned 96, she received another award – the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement. The prestigious theater award was presented at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, but Lansbury never accepted the trophy in person.

Even then, fans were worried – now family, colleagues and admirers are mourning the actress. Lansbury died on Tuesday, just five days before her 97th birthday, her family said in a statement obtained by the German Press Agency. Her mother died “peacefully” in her sleep at home, her three children wrote.

Many know and love the British-American actress under the name Jessica Fletcher: Lansbury probably got the most fans with her leading role in the TV series “Murder, She Wrote” (originally “Murder, She Wrote”). Running for twelve years, it was one of the most successful detective series on US television. In 1996, Lansbury solved her last case as the curious amateur detective Fletcher.

Lansbury was shaped by his father’s death

She was born in 1925 in London’s East End. Her father died of cancer when she was a child. The shocking loss changed her completely, Lansbury told the British newspaper “Daily Mail” in 2014. In her grief, she became a dreamer and followed her mother’s profession early on. Irish actress Moyna MacGill moved to New York and then Los Angeles with her four children during World War II.

At 17, Lansbury was working in a department store when an agent noticed the young actress. The Hollywood studio MGM was looking for an actress with a British accent. “One minute I’m wrapping Christmas presents in a store, the next minute I’m filming with Ingrid Bergman. It was a miracle,” Lansbury told the Daily Mail. Her first film, the psychological thriller Gaslight, in which she played a devious maid, earned Lansbury an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress in 1945.

Awarded an honorary Oscar in 2013

This dream start was followed a year later by the second nomination for the horror drama “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. For the third time, Lansbury could hope for an Oscar with her role as a cold-blooded mastermind in the political thriller “The Ambassador of Fear”, opposite Frank Sinatra. Although she always came away empty-handed in the competition, the film academy finally recognized the star with an honorary Oscar in 2013. A year later, the title “lady” was added, after being honored by the British Queen.

When she was 19, she married Richard Cromwell, who was many years her senior. The marriage barely lasted a year. Cromwell was homosexual, he hadn’t told Hollywood or Lansbury that. In 1949 she said yes to British actor and later producer Peter Shaw. The relationship lasted 54 years – until his death in 2003. Shaw brought a son into the marriage and they had two children together.

In the 1970s, the actress became a celebrated stage star with musicals such as “Gypsy” and “Sweeney Todd” on Broadway. She was also part of the star cast of crime films such as Death on the Nile (1978) and Murder in the Mirror (1980).

“Murder is her hobby” was a family project

At 60, an age when many actresses complain about lack of roles, Lansbury made it big as detective Jessica Fletcher. The more than 260 episodes of the TV series “Murder Is Her Hobby” (1984-1996) were a family project: son Anthony often directed, husband Shaw was on board as producer. Lansbury told NPR radio in 2000 that she had solved 264 murder cases and loved the role. Fletcher was brave, sexy, liberal and athletic, qualities in a woman that she liked very much.

Lansbury returned in 2005 after a long break from filming with a role as a ghastly great-aunt in the fantasy fairy tale “A Magical Nanny”. At the age of 89 she appeared in the stage play “Blithe Spirit” in London and in 2015 won an Olivier Award, the most important theater prize in Great Britain. Three years later she appeared as a balloon seller in the musical film “Mary Poppins’ Return” (2018) in the cinema.