At the age of 93, Angela Lansbury is not sitting back and allowing her legacy as a theatre, film, and TV star to keep her occupied. Rather, she remains a working actress, one who will appear in 2018’s “Mary Poppins Returns,” as the Balloon Lady, a featured character from P.L. Travers’ Mary Poppins books. Here, Lansbury will appear alongside a stacked cast that also features Emily Blunt, Meryl Streep, Colin Firth, and the return of Dick Van Dyke.
Of course, VisionTV viewers get to see Lansbury weeknights at 7pm ET/4pm PT as the incomparable Jessica Fletcher in “Murder, She Wrote.”
During a new interview with Star2.com, Lansbury reflected on the time she spent on the still much-revered television series.
“It was a slice of my career that was totally unconnected to anything that I had done before,” recalled Lansbury. “Why did I go to television? I went to television to make some money, because you don’t make any money in the theatre, and you don’t make money from the occasional movie.”
Although Lansbury was admittedly attracted to the financial side of working in TV, she by no means coasted in the medium. For “Murder, She Wrote,” the Academy Award-nominated actress put much thought into how to properly portray Jessica Fletcher.
“Making Jessica Fletcher the character I ended up playing took me several years,” added Lansbury. “She started off a little bit goofy, but finally I made her a woman of my age and of my intellect. I think that is what made her such an appealing character for the world – because she was somebody that people could understand and make part of their lives.”
What must’ve helped Lansbury in this instance was her deep acting background. While her first official acting credit on IMDB.com is listed as 1944’s “Gaslight,” Lansbury started learning about performance well before that.
“Acting is a craft and I learned it at a very young age,” relayed Lansbury. “I started in drama school when I was only 13 years old, and I learned from the best. I was a child of the theatre at a very young age. And you learn a lot of disciplines when you are young.
She continued: “Of course, I had the support of my mother who was an actress and certainly it was inbred in me. And being an actress, you can’t believe a word I say, because I am acting all the time. Of course I am kidding.”
-Adam Grant
“Murder, She Wrote” can be seen Weeknights at 7pm ET/4pm PT on VisionTV!