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    Peter S. Fischer, Who Helped Create ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 88

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    He spent many years as a writer and producer of the hit mystery series starring Angela Lansbury. He later wrote his own mystery novels, set in Hollywood.Peter S. Fischer, a creator, writer and producer of “Murder, She Wrote,” the long-running television series that starred Angela Lansbury as a mystery novelist and amateur sleuth, died on Oct. 30 in Pacific Grove, Calif. He was 88.His death, at a care facility, was confirmed by his grandson Jake McElrath, who said he did not know the cause.In 1983, Mr. Fischer and the prolific producers Richard Levinson and William Link pitched CBS on a new series. The three had worked together on “Columbo,” the hit show starring Peter Falk as a rumpled, underestimated police detective, and “Ellery Queen,” with Jim Hutton as a detective who was also an author. This time, their idea was “Blacke’s Magic,” about a magician who solves mysteries.At a meeting with a CBS executive in late 1983, they were told that the network was more interested in a murder mystery series with a female lead. Soon after, Mr. Fischer, he came up with an idea when he watched A Caribbean Mystery,” a CBS-TV movie starring Helen Hayes as Miss Jane Marple, the amateur detective created by Agatha Christie.“Why don’t we meld Miss Marple and Miss Christie into one character, a mystery writer who actually solved murder mysteries using logic, good sense, observations and a twinkly sense of humor that masks the sharp brain lurking beneath a very attractive hairdo?,” Mr. Fischer recalled thinking in his 2013 autobiography, “Me and ‘Murder, She Wrote.’”He came up with the names of both the character, Jessica Fletcher, and the fictional town where she solved murders — Cabot Cove, Maine.But they needed a star. Jean Stapleton, who had portrayed the saintly, ditsy Edith Bunker on “All in the Family,” turned them down. Then they heard that Ms. Lansbury, who was renowned for her work in Broadway shows like “Sweeney Todd” and films like “The Manchurian Candidate,” was willing to star in a TV series. She signed on.Ms. Lansbury with Erin Moran and Tom Bosley in a scene from a 1986 episode of “Murder, She Wrote.”Everett CollectionThe series was an immediate hit and lasted 12 seasons. Mr. Fischer wrote a few dozen episodes and was the executive producer from 1984 to 1991. He shared nominations for the Primetime Emmy Award for outstanding dramatic series three times and won the Golden Globe Award for best drama series twice. In 1985, Mr. Fischer won an Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America for the “Murder, She Wrote” episode “Deadly Lady.”“Peter was a very good showrunner,” Ms. Lansbury, who died last year, told the Television Academy in 1998. “He was really quite brilliant at what he did.”But, she said, “I always wanted to make it appeal to more people and to enlarge our audience even more.”One of the changes she made after succeeding Mr. Fischer as executive producer in 1992, was to move Jessica part time to an apartment in Manhattan, where she taught criminology at a college and tracked down killers in a new location. He disagreed with that decision, but it was no longer his to make.“To throw this over to become a ‘big city woman’ violated everything I believed about her,” he said in interview with his son Christopher in 2012 after he started writing mystery novels.Mr. Fischer in 2018. He retired from television in the 1990s and later wrote murder mysteries set in postwar Hollywood.Nic Coury/Monterey County WeeklyPeter Stephen Fischer was born on Aug. 10, 1935, in Queens. His father, Paul, worked for Johnnie Walker, the Scotch whisky maker. His mother, Dorothy (Sullivan) Fischer, was a homemaker.Peter fell in love with reading at a young age and started writing short stories as a boy. He wrote plays in high school and at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied in a department devoted to writing, speech and drama, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in 1956.He married Lucille Warnock in 1957.Mr. Fischer did not become a full-time writer right away; instead he made a living in direct mail, as an insurance investigator and as a trade magazine editor. He also published a monthly magazine, Sports Car News, out of his house in Smithtown, N.Y., on Long Island.At 35, he got his screenwriting break. He had written a script about a dystopian future in which couples are permitted only one child and people over 65 are denied medical care. With help from his brother, Geoffrey, a casting director at Universal Television, the script found its way to the producer Aaron Spelling and was made into an ABC movie, “The Last Child” (1971), with Michael Cole and Janet Margolin as a couple who are willing to defy the law to have a second child after the death of their firstborn.He then wrote episodes of several Universal series, including “Marcus Welby, M.D.,” “Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law,” “Kojak,” “Baretta” and “Columbo,” for which he also worked as a story editor.Three shows Mr. Fischer created or co-created had short runs: “The Eddie Capra Mysteries” (1978), starring Vincent Baggetta as a lawyer; “The Law & Harry McGraw” (1987), a spinoff of “Murder, She Wrote” starring Jerry Orbach as a private investigator; and “Blacke’s Magic” (1986), starring Hal Linden — the collaboration with Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson that CBS did not want. (It ended up on NBC.)In addition to his grandson, Mr. Fischer is survived by his daughter, Megan McElrath; four other grandchildren; two great-grandchildren; his half sisters, Paula Shorts and Stephanie Donnelly; and his half brother, Stephen Fischer. His wife died in 2017. His sons also died before him — Stephen in 2014, Christopher in 2020.Mr. Fischer retired from television in the 1990s. He recast himself a decade ago as a murder mystery writer. He self-published more than 20 books set in postwar Hollywood, with a studio press agent as the sleuth and real movies as backdrops.“He loved old movies,” Ms. McElrath, his daughter, said by phone. “So he came up with this idea of a Jessica Fletcher-like character who’s not in law enforcement but finds himself tripping over all these murders.” More

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      How Angela Lansbury and Stephen Sondheim Came to Appear in ‘Glass Onion’

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      A fan of musical theater, Rian Johnson had long hoped to land the two stars. But he was already in the editing phase when they agreed to take part.When “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery” isn’t setting up its actors to look like the possible perpetrators of a devious crime, the comic caper is reveling in its star-studded ensemble.There are of course the A-listers who populate the principal cast, including Daniel Craig, Janelle Monaé, Edward Norton and others. And there are the fleeting, unheralded appearances from famous faces like Ethan Hawke, Serena Williams and Yo-Yo Ma that function as rapid-fire visual gags.But a couple of these cameos now carry an unexpected poignancy. In the prologue of the film, which was released on Netflix on Friday, the sleuth Benoit Blanc (Craig) is in a melancholic funk, looking for ways to keep his brain engaged at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.We see Blanc relaxing in his bathtub, playing the multiplayer video game Among Us with a squad of online celebrities that includes Natasha Lyonne and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.The other two members of Blanc’s eclectic gaming group are Stephen Sondheim, the renowned composer of musicals like “Company,” “Into the Woods” and “A Little Night Music,” and Angela Lansbury, the decorated stage and screen actor from “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Murder, She Wrote.”Both stars have died since work was completed on “Glass Onion” — Sondheim in November 2021 at age 91 and Lansbury this past October at age 96 — and the film may well be the final screen appearance for each of them.It’s a bittersweet occasion for their fans, a group that includes Rian Johnson, the writer and director of “Glass Onion” and creator of the “Knives Out” series. As Johnson explained in a recent video interview, he wanted the Sondheim and Lansbury cameos to stand as tributes to two of his favorite artists — and to give him an excuse to interact with these cultural greats whose paths he might not otherwise have crossed.Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91.Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows.Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview.His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers.New Books: The year since Sondheim’s death has seen an array of books offering further glimpses into his life. We look at some of them.Now, Johnson said, his experience in securing the involvement of his personal heroes has taught him never to take such opportunities for granted. “One thing I’ve learned is that every moment you get with somebody that you respect, savor that time,” he said, “and put yourself in that situation as often as possible.”While Johnson’s affection for Sondheim may not be immediately evident from his résumé — the filmmaker’s credits include “Star Wars: The Last Jedi” and the time-travel thriller “Looper” — Johnson grew up a fan of musical theater, and included a shout-out to Sondheim in the original “Knives Out”: a scene of Craig lost in thought as he sings along with “Losing My Mind,” from the Sondheim musical “Follies.”Sondheim was also a lover of wordplay, games and crossword puzzles, and he enjoyed orchestrating murder-mystery parties with his friend Anthony Perkins. He and Perkins wrote the screenplay for the 1973 whodunit “The Last of Sheila,” which starred James Coburn, Dyan Cannon, Raquel Welch and Ian McShane, and which Johnson proudly cited as a source of inspiration for his “Knives Out” films.Sondheim’s ties to the mystery genre go deeper still: his only nonmusical Broadway production was the play “Getting Away With Murder,” which he wrote with George Furth and which ran for just over a month in 1996. In an interview with The New York Times that year, he recounted how Laurence Olivier had told him he’d used Sondheim as his model for the game-loving mystery author he played in the 1972 movie “Sleuth.” (In the same interview, Anthony Shaffer, the author of “Sleuth,” denied a longstanding rumor that he had originally titled it “Who’s Afraid of Stephen Sondheim?”)Through his love of Sondheim’s musicals, Johnson was introduced to Angela Lansbury, who played Mrs. Lovett in the original Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” as well as a filmed version that played frequently on Johnson’s television. That is, when Johnson wasn’t glued to “Murder, She Wrote,” the cozy CBS series that cast Lansbury as the crime-solving author Jessica Fletcher. For children of the 1980s, that show “was actually pretty pivotal in installing a love of whodunits and murder mysteries into all of our brains,” said Johnson, who also slipped a few seconds of a Spanish-dubbed “Murder, She Wrote” episode into the original “Knives Out.”Ram Bergman, Johnson’s producing partner, said that Sondheim’s and Lansbury’s cameos were recorded during the editing of “Glass Onion,” as he and Johnson tried to reach them, working every connection they had.In Sondheim’s case, Bergman said, “I wasn’t really sure how to get to him. But then I was on a call with Bryan Lourd, our agent, and it somehow came up. I said, we really would love Stephen to do this. And I swear, five minutes later, he emailed me: he’s going to do it.”Bergman added, “Rian was in heaven, and I was in heaven because I knew how much he meant for Rian.”Sondheim performed his contribution on a recorded Zoom call. In that conversation, Johnson said, “I mentioned to him that we were trying to get Angela Lansbury. And he said, ‘Oh, Angie — I’m friends with her. Tell her I’m doing it. She’ll do it.’”Later on, Johnson went to Lansbury’s home in Los Angeles and recorded her portion on his laptop computer.“She couldn’t have been lovelier and more generous,” Johnson said, adding that Lansbury was perfect for the scene in every way except one: “Not a gamer,” he explained. “And so she was very patient in letting me describe the rules of Among Us, up to a point. At which point she just said, ‘You know what? Just tell me what the lines are. I’ll trust you.’”Those were Johnson’s only interactions with Sondheim and Lansbury before they died. In each of his conversations, Johnson said, he wasn’t ashamed of sharing his admiration for them.“I allowed myself to have that little awkward moment of saying to them what I’m sure every person who meets them says,” he said. “But still, it felt really nice to tell them that I wouldn’t be here doing this if it weren’t for them.”Getting to pay this kind of posthumous homage to his idols is a bittersweet distinction, Johnson said: “It’s sad, because as a fan, I wish they were still around and making stuff,” he said. “I hope they would have enjoyed the little scene and gotten a laugh out of it.”Natasha Lyonne did not get to interact directly with Lansbury or Sondheim but is no less proud to be part of it.Asked what it was like to have played even a minor role in their curtain calls, Lyonne replied in the arch spirit of a “Knives Out” movie: “Honey, I know what you’re getting at and it wasn’t me,” she said. “I have alibis for both.”Then, with more sincerity, she continued, “It goes without saying that they were giant losses of two incredible lives well lived. I guess we’ll only know if I make it to 90, if I was actually worthy of being up there with them.” More

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      in Theater

      The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

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      Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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      Angela Lansbury, TV’s Favorite Sleuth on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ Dies at 96

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      She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury in 2010 to discuss her life and accomplishments on the stage and screen. She spoke with us with the understanding the interview would be published only after her death.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAngela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.Her death was announced in a statement by her family.Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five competitive Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. She also received a special Tony for lifetime achievement at this year’s ceremony. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.Ms. Lansbury as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”It might also have been a matter of bones. Her full, round face was not well suited for the dramatic lighting of the time, which favored the more angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any event, she appeared in many a forgettable film before breaking out as the glamorous, madcap aunt in “Mame” on Broadway.MGM regularly cast her as an older woman, or a nasty one. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper magnate trying to get her married lover elected president.With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury joined the national touring productions of two stage plays, “Remains to Be Seen” and “Affairs of State.” But when she returned to the movies as a freelance actress, she again found herself cast as either of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.”Ms. Lansbury with Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” She played a witch.DisneyShe was Elvis Presley’s possessive mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961). She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Though she was only three years Mr. Harvey’s senior, her maternal authority was entirely convincing when she told him, “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.”) She played a woman who kills her husband in “Please Murder Me” (1956) and an overbearing mother in “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958). And so it went.On to BroadwayMs. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso,” a translation of a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theater work. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.”In 1964 she was cast as a corrupt mayor in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” A notorious failure, it closed after only 12 previews and nine performances, but it showed she could summon the right stuff for live musical performance. “I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,” she said in 2009. “So I learned how to belt.”Ms. Lansbury with Frankie Michaels in “Mame.” More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, were said to be under consideration for the role.via Angela LansburyMs. Lansbury was anything but a shoo-in for the coveted lead in “Mame,” the Jerry Herman musical adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel “Auntie Mame,” which had already been adapted into a stage play and a movie — both starring Rosalind Russell, and both great successes.Ms. Russell did not want to play Mame again. Mary Martin was cast but opted out. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, were said to be under consideration. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition for the role in front of the show’s creative and financial principals.In a Life magazine cover article about the show and her part in it, she recalled that there had been many distracting interruptions by men in dark glasses, compelling her to sing the songs over again. “Then they said, ‘Goodbye, thank you.’ That was all,” she said.Back home in Malibu, Calif., with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, she waited for months for a call from the East. Finally, she flew to New York and confronted the producers.“I am going back to California,” she recalled telling them, “and unless you tell me — let’s face it, I have prostrated myself — now, yes or no, that’s the end of it.” That afternoon, she got an official yes.Her performance made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”Ms. Lansbury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesTo Ms. Lansbury’s disappointment, though, Lucille Ball was chosen for the film version of “Mame,” which was not a success.Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony for best actress as the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in “Dear World,” a 1969 musical adaptation of “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” The production itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. For a while, though, it held the distinction of charging the highest ticket prices on Broadway: $12.50 for the best seats (the equivalent of about $105 today).She then returned to Hollywood, where she played an aging German aristocrat in “Something for Everyone” (1970), a rare cinematic effort from the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and a witch in the Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971).But this was a tumultuous time for her and her family. Their Malibu house was destroyed in a brush fire. Her son and daughter were using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California for the coast of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse design.It was the sanctuary they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children overcame their drug problems. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, with credits including numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”; Deirdre eventually married Enzo Battarra, a restaurateur, and became his business partner.With Len Cariou in “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lansbury won a Tony Award for her performance as the baker Mrs. Lovett.Martha SwopeOver the next decade Ms. Lansbury worked mostly on the stage, in London and New York. She starred as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” which opened in London and won her a third Tony when it reached Broadway in 1974. She won yet another for her performance as Mrs. Lovett, the baker with a grisly source of meat for her pies, in Mr. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou in the title role, which opened in March 1979 and ran for 557 performances.Success on the London stage closed a circle for Ms. Lansbury.Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, and grew up there in upper-middle-class comfort, the daughter of Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician who was the son of a Labour Party leader, George Lansbury. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9; her grandfather died five years later, and that loss, together with the Blitz, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half sister and her twin younger brothers.“We left everything behind,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “Suddenly, we just weren’t there anymore.”Ms. Lansbury as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the hugely successful CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”CBSA Surprise HitFor all her stage success, Ms. Lansbury would capture the biggest audience of her career in 1984, when she was cast as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”It was widely believed that the series, whose protagonist was a bicycle-riding widow living in a small town in Maine, had little chance against sexier competition like the action crime drama “Knight Rider” on NBC. The conventional wisdom was that advertisers would not go after the older audience the show was likely to attract.“We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,” Richard Levinson, one of the show’s creators, recalled. “At best, we hoped that it would be a marginal success.” Instead, the show became a huge hit. In its second season it outdrew Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated anthology series, “Amazing Stories,” by more than two million viewers a week, and it went on to run until 1996.“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” Ms. Lansbury said in an interview with The Times early in the show’s second season, “is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”She received 12 successive Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher, but she never won.Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. And there were more Broadway performances to come. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacements could keep her off the stage for very long.She starred with Marian Seldes in the Terrence McNally comedy “Deuce” in 2007 and played the eccentric medium Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” earning Tony No. 5. Her lifetime achievement award brought the total to six — a total matched only by Audra McDonald and Julie Harris (including Ms. Harris’s own lifetime achievement award). Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her performance later that year as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of the Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.”Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.” A year later, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.Ms. Lansbury and the MGM executive Peter Shaw. They married in 1949.via Angela LansburyMr. Shaw, her husband, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to Richard Cromwell, an American actor, ended in divorce after less than a year. Ms. Lansbury is survived by her sons, Anthony and David; her daughter, Deirdre; a brother, Edgar; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.While many older actresses complained about a shortage of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacked for work and seldom turned it down.She did opt out of a big chance to return to Broadway for the 2017-18 season, in a revival of “The Chalk Garden,” saying she had decided to spend more time with her family rather than face a long, lonely stretch of living in New York. But other good roles continued to catch her fancy, including the rich, imperious Aunt March in the BBC mini-series “Little Women” and the nice lady who sells magical balloons in the film “Mary Poppins Returns.” Both were released in 2018.“I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she told Katie Couric of CBS in 2009. “So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it.”Ms. Lansbury in 2009. “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she said that year.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBut, she added, there was one thing she was still missing after all those years: “I’d like to do one great movie before I pass along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I think there’s one out there somewhere.” More

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      Angela Lansbury, Broadway’s Beloved Everywoman

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      She performed without sentimentality or histrionics, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining professional and approachable.We know that actors are not their roles, but it still came as a shock to see Angela Lansbury backstage in bunny slippers and a tatty robe, offering visitors a nice hot cuppa.This was in May 2007, just minutes after she’d finished playing Leona Mullen, a retired tennis player, in Terrence McNally’s “Deuce,” the play that brought her back to Broadway, at age 81, after a 24-year absence. She’d based Mullen in part, she told me secretly, on Ann Richards, the former Texas governor, borrowing her bearing along with the bright red suit.You’d think that after playing hundreds of characters over a 75-year career, at least some element of some of them would have stuck. But the woman in the slippers and robe was no Cora Hoover Hooper, the cartoon mayoress of “Anyone Can Whistle,” her first stage musical role, in 1964. Nor was she Mame Dennis, the glamorous bohemian she created in the show that made her a Broadway star in 1966. And she was certainly no Nellie Lovett, the human-pie-maker of “Sweeney Todd,” a performance that earned her the fourth of six Tony Awards, in 1979.These, along with several still to come — the daffy Madame Arcati in “Blithe Spirit” and the imperious Madame Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music,” not to mention her dozens of movie and television roles from 1944 to 2018 — were, she told me, just “gloves.” She put them on and took them off.Lansbury as the daffy Madame Arcati, with Rupert Everett, in “Blithe Spirit” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd underneath? “Just a cabbage,” she said. “I absorb everything.”If Lansbury, who died on Tuesday at 96, was “boring as all get out,” as she later added, that too was a costume, and a tool. The hausfrau disguise permitted all the others, allowing the cabbage to store everything for later use. The corollary was that she needed to play many different kinds of characters, to make the best yield of all she’d observed. Her family said she’d go anywhere for a false nose.So when she was creating the amoral Lovett in “Sweeney,” she thought back to her childhood in London, and the cheerful, can-do Cockney help in her home. Their attitude turned out to be the key to the comedy: She played the character not as an accessory to murder but as a woman brightly solving problems. (Dead clients at the barbershop upstairs? Not enough meat for her pies downstairs? Bingo!) Far from critiquing her by applying an ironic varnish to the performance, Lansbury dared to advocate for her by making her as clever and merry as possible. The audience could supply the irony.Hers was a prodigious memory, but to achieve such effects it also took finesse and courage. McNally, the “Deuce” playwright, marveled that “if you say to her, ‘You’re doing 1.3 on that line, can you do 1.4?’ she could do it and you’d see the difference.” Marian Seldes, her co-star, agreed: “She is such a brilliant technician as well as having a pool of emotions she can tap into in a second to show the audience and then take away. The technician is like a great musician: I play this note and then I stop.”Taste, for Lansbury, was a matter of making the right choices in the right amounts. She disdained acting that depended on personality instead of action, and when I spoke to her at length in 2007, she seemed to connect that to a childhood spent shouldering her mother’s grief after her father died and the Blitz began. She was already independent, unafraid and a problem solver:“I remember taking the bus home in absolute pitch black, walking up Finchley Road alone, the balloons in the air. It was exciting; anything could happen. The first time the air-raid alarm went off my sister lost it, but I did not. There’s a portion of me that simply doesn’t react to things like this. Instead, I slow down to a dead crawl and then make the right choices.”Lansbury as the amoral Mrs. Lovett, with Len Cariou as the title character, in “Sweeney Todd” in 1979.Martha Swope/The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsThat’s how she performed, too, without sentimentality or histrionics. But that doesn’t mean she didn’t stand up for herself and her characters. While working on “Anyone Can Whistle,” she complained to Stephen Sondheim, who wrote the songs, that she didn’t really understand and thus feel comfortable playing the corrupt mayoress: There was “no there there.”Sondheim didn’t know what to do about that, but when she added that her co-star, Lee Remick, “has five songs while I have four,” he said, “That I can solve.” He immediately wrote “A Parade in Town” for her — a great song that evened the score and not incidentally gave Lansbury a deeper character to play.In a way, her characters were like her family: People she cared for deeply but recognized as separate beings. She was connected to them through action. It was thus an easy if no less painful decision to drop out of the musical “The Visit” to care for her husband, Peter Shaw, when he became very ill, taking care of him until his death in 2003. “And when I say I took care of him,” she said, with as much overt emotion as I ever heard from her, “I really took care of him.”That lack of personal neediness made her perhaps the best-loved of all Broadway (and television) stars of her time, embodying the full range of human joy and depravity while remaining, in her own deportment, professional, approachable and neatly tucked in. You never felt, as you did with so many divas, the need to feed her ego or point her toward help. Quite the reverse: When she met McNally, drunk at a party in 1981, she told him — “with such love and concern,” as he later recalled — “I don’t know you very well, but every time I see you, you’re drunk, and it bothers me.” It was the beginning of his sobriety.Feeling through action was the Lansbury touch, and if it came at some cost to her, it never showed. “She’s very brave,” Seldes told me. “She never wants to be loved; she wants to play the part.”What showed was the brilliance of her technique, informed by feeling you couldn’t in fact see. Perhaps McNally was thinking of that when he had Seldes’s “Deuce” character say, “People should love what they do,” to which Lansbury provided a sharp correction.“People should be good at what they do,” she said. More

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      ‘A Strange Loop’ Wins Best Musical as Tonys Celebrate Broadway’s Return

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      “A Strange Loop,” a scalding story about a gay, Black theater artist confronting self-doubt and societal disapproval, won the Tony Award for best new musical Sunday night, giving another huge accolade to a challenging contemporary production that had already won a Pulitzer Prize.The soul-baring show, nurtured by nonprofits and developed over many years, triumphed over two flashy pop musicals, “MJ,” a jukebox musical about the entertainer Michael Jackson, and “Six,” an irreverent reconsideration of Henry VIII’s ill-fated wives, in a six-way race.“A Strange Loop” garnered widespread praise from critics; on Sunday night, Michael R. Jackson, the writer who spent nearly two decades working on it, acknowledged how personal the project was as he collected his first Tony Award, for best book of a musical.“I wrote it at a time when I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” he said. “I didn’t know how I was going to move forward. I felt unseen. I felt unheard. I felt misunderstood, and I just wanted to create a little bit of a life raft for myself as a Black gay man.”The ceremony — the 75th Tony Awards presentation — provided an opportunity for Broadway to celebrate its return and its perseverance, hoping that a dash of razzle-dazzle, a dollop of contemporary creativity and a sprinkling of nostalgia will help lure theatergoers back to a pandemic-scarred industry now in full swing but still craving more customers.The season that just ended was a tough one: It started late (most theaters remained closed until September), and was repeatedly disrupted (coronavirus cases obliterated its old show-must-go-on ethos, prompting cancellations and performer absences). With tourism still down, it was also short on audience.Patti LuPone won the Tony Award for best featured actress in a musical for “Company.” It was her third Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Our industry has been through so much,” Marianne Elliott, who won a Tony Award for directing a gender-reversed revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical comedy “Company,” said in her acceptance speech. “It felt at times that live theater was endangered.”But in the glittering ceremony at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan, a parade of performers celebrated all that went well: Theaters reopened, long-running shows returned, and an unusually diverse array of plays and musicals arrived to entertain, provoke and inspire theatergoers.The best play Tony went to “The Lehman Trilogy,” a sweeping saga about the rise and fall of the Lehman Brothers banking business. Using three shape-shifting actors, contained within a spinning glass box of a set, the play journeyed all the way from the Wall Street giant’s humble origins in 1844 to its ignominious collapse in 2008. The show, written by Stefano Massini and Ben Power, picked up not only the Tony for best play, but also for the play’s director, Sam Mendes; its set designer, Es Devlin; and the great British actor, Simon Russell Beale, who thanked audiences for showing up, despite pandemic protocols and public health concerns.“You trusted us,” he said. “You came with open arms. It wasn’t easy at that point to come to the theater because of all those regulations. But you welcomed us.”“The Lehman Trilogy” won out against four other contenders, “Clyde’s,” “Hangmen,” “The Minutes” and “Skeleton Crew.”“Take Me Out” emerged victorious in the best play revival category, a particularly strong field that included productions of “American Buffalo,” “How I Learned to Drive,” “Trouble in Mind” and “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf.”Written by Richard Greenberg, “Take Me Out” first ran on Broadway in 2003 and won the best play Tony that year; this year’s revival, presented by the nonprofit Second Stage Theater, was directed by Scott Ellis. It is about what happens when a baseball player, portrayed in this production by Jesse Williams, comes out as gay; Jesse Tyler Ferguson picked up his first Tony for his portrayal of the player’s investment adviser, who is also gay.“Company,” a musical first staged in 1970 that wittily and sometimes bitterly examines married life, won the Tony for musical revival, besting a much-praised revival of “Caroline, or Change,” as well as a starry revival of “The Music Man” that, thanks to the appeal of leading man Hugh Jackman, has been the top-selling show on Broadway since it opened.The award for “Company” reflected not only admiration for the reimagined production but also respect for Sondheim, its composer and lyricist, who is revered as one of the most important figures in American musical theater, and who died in November. The “Hamilton” creator Lin-Manuel Miranda, who was mentored by Sondheim, introduced a tribute to him, saying, “I stand here on behalf of generations of artists he took the time to encourage.”The ceremony was hosted by Ariana DeBose.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe Tonys, hosted by Ariana DeBose and broadcast on CBS, honored not only shows, performers, writers and designers, but also the understudies who saved so many performances this season. And DeBose, who this year won an Academy Award as Anita in the Steven Spielberg remake of “West Side Story,” paid tribute to the season’s extraordinary diversity, saying, “I feel like the phrase Great White Way is becoming more of a nickname as opposed to a how-to guide.”She noted the season’s high volume of work by Black writers, which came about as producers and theater owners scrambled to respond to demands for more representation and opportunity for Black artists after the national unrest over racism during the summer of 2020. This year’s class of Tony nominees featured a large number of Black artists, reflecting the fact that work by Black writers led to more jobs for Black performers, designers, directors, and more.The season being honored — the first since the coronavirus pandemic forced theaters to close in March of 2020 — featured 56 productions, including 34 eligible for Tony Awards because they opened between Feb. 20, 2020 and May 4, 2022. (The others were returning productions, many of them long-running hits.)The Covid challenges were costly: 6.7 million people attended a Broadway show during the 2021-22 season, down from 14.8 million during the 2018-19 season, which was the last full season before the pandemic; total grosses were $845 million, down from $1.8 billion.The Tonys served as a chance for Broadway to try to entice television viewers to become Times Square visitors. But one challenge: Viewership for all televised awards shows has been steadily falling. The Tonys audience had a recent peak in 2016, at 8.7 million viewers, when “Hamilton” was a contender; in 2019, there were 5.4 million viewers, and last year, when the Tonys held a ceremony in September to coincide with the reopening of theaters, just 2.6 million tuned in.Michael R. Jackson won the Tony for best book of a musical for “A Strange Loop.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThis year’s winners featured some Broadway veterans, including Patti LuPone, picking up her third Tony Award for her ferocious turn as an alcohol-addled married friend of the chronically single protagonist in “Company”; and Phylicia Rashad, winning her second Tony for playing a factory worker in “Skeleton Crew.” Among the other performers who collected Tony Awards: Joaquina Kalukango, for her starring role as a 19th-century New York City tavern owner in “Paradise Square”; Matt Doyle, who played a groom with a zany case of wedding day jitters in “Company,” and Deirdre O’Connell, who won for her remarkable lip-synced performance as a kidnapping victim in the play “Dana H.”“I would love for this little prize to be a token for every person who is wondering, ‘Should I be trying to make something that could work on Broadway or that could win me a Tony Award, or should I be making the weird art that is haunting me, that frightens me, that I don’t know how to make, that I don’t know if anyone in the whole world will understand?’” O’Connell said. “Please let me, standing here, be a little sign to you from the universe to make the weird art.”“A Strange Loop” tells the story of a Broadway usher, named Usher, who is trying to write a musical about a Broadway usher trying to write a musical; his thoughts, many of them self-critical, are portrayed by six performers, who each appear in multiple guises. The musical began its life Off Broadway, with a 2019 production at Playwrights Horizons in association with Page 73 Productions. After winning the Pulitzer, it had another pre-Broadway production at Woolly Mammoth Theater Company in Washington, D.C. It had support throughout those nonprofit runs from the producer Barbara Whitman, who is now the lead producer of the commercial run on Broadway; she was also a lead producer of the Tony-winning “Fun Home.”The Broadway production, which opened in April, has seen an uptick at the box office since being nominated for 11 Tony Awards (it won two), but has room for growth: During the week that ended June 5, it filled 89 percent of the 912 seats at the Lyceum Theater, grossing $685,772, with an average ticket price of $105.“Six” and “MJ,” although unsuccessful in the six-way race for best new musical, are doing substantially better at the box office, and did notch some big victories at the awards ceremony.“Six” picked up the Tony Award for best score during the first minutes of the ceremony. Its music and lyrics were written by two young British artists, Toby Marlow and Lucy Moss, who came up with the idea while undergraduates at Cambridge University, and who were discovered by a commercial producer following a buzz-building first run at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The musical’s costume designer, Gabriella Slade, also won a Tony for her Tudor-style-meets-contemporary-clubwear outfits.“MJ” also landed key prizes, including for the lead performance by Myles Frost, a 22-year-old in his first professional stage role, and for the crowd-pleasing choreography by Christopher Wheeldon, who also directed the musical.The other contenders, “Girl From the North Country,” featuring the songs of Bob Dylan; “Mr. Saturday Night,” starring Billy Crystal as a washed-up comedian; and “Paradise Square,” about race relations in Civil War-era New York, appeared to be less of a factor in the competition.Simon Russell Beale won the Tony Award for best actor for his work in “The Lehman Trilogy,” which won best play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat first hour of the awards ceremony, viewable only on the streaming channel Paramount+, was hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, both of whom are currently starring in Broadway plays — he in a revival of “American Buffalo,” and she in a new farce called “POTUS.” They began the evening with a Broadway-is-back tribute, written by Criss, extolling the virtues and challenges of theater (the song included a plea for no slapping, in a dig at the Oscars).A lifetime achievement award was given to Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television who was also a five-time host of the Tony Awards, more than any other person. Lansbury, who is 96, was not able to attend in person, or even to accept by video; instead the actor Len Cariou, who starred with Lansbury in the original production of “Sweeney Todd,” for which they both won Tony Awards, paid tribute to her and introduced a video of career highlights. Then the New York City Gay Men’s Chorus performed the title song from “Mame,” which was the show in which she won the first of her five competitive Tony Awards.The Tony Awards, named for actress Antoinette Perry, are presented by the Broadway League, a trade association that represents theater owners and producers, and the American Theater Wing, a theater advocacy organization. The awards have been presented since 1947; there was no ceremony in 2020, and last year’s September ceremony honored shows from the truncated prepandemic season.This year’s awards were spread among 11 shows, with none coming anywhere near the record 12 prizes picked up by “The Producers” in 2001. The biggest hauls went to “Company” and “The Lehman Trilogy,” each of which won five awards; “MJ” won four, and “A Strange Loop,” “Dana H.,” “Six” and “Take Me Out” each won two. Taking home one prize each were “Girl From the North Country,” “Paradise Square,” “Skeleton Crew” and “The Skin of Our Teeth.” More

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      Angela Lansbury Honored for Lifetime Achievement at the Tonys

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      Angela Lansbury, a beloved star of stage, film and television, was honored on Sunday night with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.Len Cariou, 82, who starred opposite Lansbury in the Broadway production of “Sweeney Todd,” presented the award. Lansbury, 96, was not present to accept the award in person at Radio City Music Hall.The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus also sang “Mame” as a special tribute to Lansbury. (Read on for more about that show.)The New York City Gay Men’s Chorus perform a tribute to Lifetime Achievement Award winner Angela Lansbury.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There is no one with whom I’d rather run a cutthroat business with,” Cariou said. “Angela’s extraordinary 75 year career was marked with many joyful moments onstage.”Lansbury first appeared on Broadway in 1957, in a farce called “Hotel Paradiso,” and in 1964 she starred in her first Broadway musical, “Anyone Can Whistle.” She landed her breakout Broadway role, starring as the free-spirited title character in “Mame” in 1966. She won her first Tony Award for that performance.Lansbury, center, in hat, appearing in “The Best Man” in 2012.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHer most recent Broadway appearance was in a 2012 revival of “The Best Man,” a play by Gore Vidal.In total, Lansbury has been nominated for a Tony seven times, winning in all but two instances. Here is some of what critics from The New York Times have said about those Broadway performances over the years:Mame (1966)“This star vehicle deserves its star, and vice is very much versa. No one can be surprised to learn that Angela Lansbury is an accomplished actress, but not all of us may know that she has an adequate singing voice, can dance trimly, and can combine all these matters into musical performance.” — Stanley KauffmannDear World (1969)“But for one minor miracle I suspect that ‘Dear World’ would never have seen the gloom of day. That minor miracle is Miss Lansbury and whether or not the musical is worth seeing — for it is extraordinarily tenuous — no connoisseur of the musical comedy can afford to miss Miss Lansbury’s performance. It is lovely.” — Clive BarnesGypsy (1974)Lansbury in “Gypsy” in London in 1973.Donald Cooper/Alamy“Most important of all, this new Broadway ‘Gypsy’ has brought over Angela Lansbury as Rose. Her voice has not got the Merman-belt, but she is enchanting, tragic, bewildering and bewildered. Miss Lansbury not only has a personality as big as the Statue of Liberty, but also a small core of nervousness that can make the outrageous real.” — Clive BarnesSweeney Todd (1979)“Her initial number, in which she sings of selling the worst pies in London, while pounding dough and making as many purposefully flailing gestures as a pinwheel, is a triumph.” — Richard EderDeuce (2007)“After an absence of nearly 25 years Angela Lansbury has returned to the New York stage. And she is so vitally and indelibly present that she even occasionally gives flesh to a play as wispy as ectoplasm.” — Ben BrantleyBlithe Spirit (2009)Lansbury in “Blithe Spirit” in 2009.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“But it’s Madame Arcati who walks — or rather dances — away with the show, as she has always been wont to do. Those who know Ms. Lansbury only as the bland, levelheaded Jessica Fletcher of television’s ‘Murder, She Wrote’ may not be aware of this actress’s depth and variety of technique.” — Ben BrantleyA Little Night Music (2009)“But there is only one moment in this production when all its elements cohere perfectly.That moment, halfway through the first act, belongs to Ms. Lansbury, who has hitherto been perfectly entertaining, playing Madame Armfeldt with the overripe aristocratic condescension of a Lady Bracknell.” — Ben Brantley More

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      Angela Lansbury Will Receive Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement

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      The star of stage, film and screen has already won five competitive Tony Awards, and starred in several Stephen Sondheim musicals.Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored this year with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.Lansbury, 96, who has already won five competitive Tony Awards, will receive the lifetime achievement award on June 12, when this year’s ceremony is set to take place at Radio City Music Hall and to be broadcast on CBS.Lansbury first appeared on Broadway in 1957, in a farce called “Hotel Paradiso,” and in 1964 she starred in her first Broadway musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” a flop that is remembered mostly because the songwriter was Stephen Sondheim.She was already a three-time Oscar nominee, notably for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962, when she landed her breakout Broadway role, starring as the free-spirited title character in “Mame” in 1966. She won her first Tony Award for that performance. More