Murder, She Wrote (TV Program)

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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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      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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      William Link, Co-Creator of ‘Columbo’ and ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 87

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeHoliday TVBest Netflix DocumentariesAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWilliam Link, Co-Creator of ‘Columbo’ and ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ Dies at 87With his writing partner, Richard Levinson, Mr. Link helped shape the crime-drama genre on television for decades.William Link at his office in 2010. With his writing partner, he created the TV series “Mannix,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “Columbo.” Credit…Bob Chamberlin/Los Angeles Times, via Getty ImagesJan. 5, 2021, 2:56 p.m. ETWilliam Link, a prolific screenwriter who created classics of American television like “Columbo” and “Murder, She Wrote,” doing so in a writing partnership with a friend from junior high school that lasted nearly 40 years, died on Dec. 27 in Los Angeles. He was 87.His wife, Margery Nelson, confirmed the death, at a hospital.Mr. Link’s stories about unkempt detectives and persistent private eyes shaped the mystery and crime-drama television genre. With his partner, Richard Levinson, he also created shows like “Mannix,” “Jericho” and “Blacke’s Magic.”“Murder, She Wrote” starred Angela Lansbury as a mystery writer who solves crimes in the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove. Network executives were initially skeptical of the idea of a female protagonist who wears reading glasses.But after they were sold on it, the series became one of the longest-running in television history and remains in syndication today. (Peter S. Fischer was also credited as a creator.)Angela Lansbury in “Murder, She Wrote,” which Mr. Link created with Richard Levinson and Peter S. Fischer.Credit…Corymore ProductionsAnother Link-Levinson production, “Tenafly,” starring James McEachin, was one of the first detective series to feature a Black lead actor.Their television movies also broke ground: “That Certain Summer” (1972), a drama that generated wide publicity, starred Martin Sheen as a divorced father who struggles to reveal his homosexuality to his 14-year-old son. “My Sweet Charlie” (1970), adapted from a novel and play by David Westheimer, depicted the friendship that forms between a Black New York lawyer (Al Freeman Jr.), who is falsely accused of murder, and a white pregnant teenager (Patty Duke), whom he encounters while on the run in Texas. The movie brought Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson an Emmy Award for outstanding writing in a drama.“Each time out, we tried to do something that hadn’t been seen before,” Mr. Link told The New York Times in 1987. “Something that would touch an emotional or social chord.”He met Mr. Levinson in junior high school in Philadelphia in 1946. After discovering that they both liked detective stories, they hit it off. “I was told to find a tall guy who liked to do magic and read mysteries,” Mr. Link told The Philadelphia Inquirer in 1987, “and he was told, ‘There’s a short guy who reads mysteries and does magic.’”They began writing radio scripts and stories together as they discussed their mutual admiration of the director Billy Wilder. After graduation, they both attended the Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania.They sold their first short story, to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, in 1954. When Mr. Link was drafted into the Army and sent to Germany in the late 1950s, they continued collaborating on stories by airmail. In the 1960s, they decided to try their luck in Hollywood.As they started writing episodes for shows like “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” and “The Fugitive” and creating their own, like “Mannix,” they became a prolific unit: rising early, brewing coffee and pounding out scripts to send to studios. (Mr. Link paced while Mr. Levinson typed.)They first brought the scruffy Lieutenant Columbo to life in a 1960 episode of the anthology series “The Chevy Mystery Show.” He appeared again in a play by Mr. Link and Mr. Levinson and later in a television movie they wrote, “Prescription: Murder.” The “Columbo” series, starring Peter Falk, began airing on NBC in 1971 and ran until 1978. The pair won an Emmy for their work, and the show was later revived on ABC.The first episode of the “Columbo” series, titled “Murder by the Book,” was directed by a 25-year-old Steven Spielberg. (In it, one member of a mystery writing team kills the other.)“Bill was one of my favorite and most patient teachers, and, more than anything, I learned so much from him about the true anatomy of a plot,” Mr. Spielberg said in a statement. “I caught a huge break when Bill and Dick trusted a young, inexperienced director to do the first episode of ‘Columbo.’”Mr. Link with Peter Falk, who portrayed the detective in “Columbo.” Mr. Link said of the character: “He’s a regular Joe: He’s the kind of guy you sit down, have a drink, a cup of coffee with.”William Theodore Link Jr. was born on Dec. 15, 1933, in Philadelphia and was raised in Elkins Park, a suburb. His mother, Elise (Rorecke) Link, was a homemaker. William Sr. was a textile broker who grew up in Hell’s Kitchen.Bill enjoyed drawing comic strips and began writing short mystery stories while still a boy. He and his Cub Scout friends recited his tales into a wire recorder and acted them out as if they were plays.“He loved reading Variety as a boy,” Ms. Nelson, his wife and only immediate survivor, said. “In Los Angeles, babies come out of the womb reading Variety, but he was probably the only kid in Philly reading Variety regularly in the 1940s.”Mr. Link graduated from Cheltenham High School in the early 1950s and earned a bachelor’s degree from Wharton in 1956. He married Ms. Nelson, an actor, in 1980.Mr. Levinson, who was a three-pack-a-day smoker, died of a heart attack in 1987. Afterward, Mr. Link experienced writer’s block and began seeing a psychiatrist to process the loss of his friend. The death led to his writing the television movie “The Boys” (1991), which starred John Lithgow and James Woods as two writers who develop a long partnership.“I had never written by myself; I had a fear I couldn’t write solo,” Mr. Link told The Philadelphia Inquirer that year. “I wrote the whole script in eight days. It usually took Dick and me a month. It poured out, like automatic writing. I felt like Dick was still in the room with me.”Mr. Link wrote well into his 80s, waking up early each morning to put words onto the page, and he contributed stories to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. In 2010, he published a book of original short stories about Lieutenant Columbo, bringing his best-known television character back to life years after the rumpled detective had been retired from the screen.In an interview with Mystery Scene Magazine at the time, Mr. Link reflected on the lasting adoration that people have for his cigar-chomping creation.“He’s a regular Joe,” he said. “He’s the kind of guy you sit down, have a drink, a cup of coffee with. He’s the regular working-class guy — who’s got a brilliant mind but doesn’t really tout it, you know? He’s humble, even to the murderer! And people identify with that. They like that.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More