On what would have been her 100th birthday, ten facts you might not know about actress Angela Lansbury:
She was born in the Regent’s Park area of London, although spent much of the first five years of her life living in a flat in Poplar. Her father, Edgar, was a politician who was a member of the Communist party and the Labour party. He served as Honorary Treasurer of the East London Federation of Suffragettes and Mayor of Poplar. He was the second Communist mayor in British history. Angela’s mother was an actress from Belfast, Moyna Macgill.
Angela’s first acting role was in a production at the Webber Douglas School of Singing and Dramatic Art, Kensington, West London, where she was a student, in her mid teens. The play was Mary of Scotland by Maxwell Anderson which was about the life of Mary, Queen of Scots. Lansbury played one of the queen's ladies-in-waiting.
Not long after that, the school was evacuated due to the second world war. Angela’s family sailed to New York to escape the war, on a steamship named the Duchess of Atholl. It was the last trip that ship made with evacuees before it was sunk by a German U-boat. They departed from Liverpool, which was bombed the day they left.
At 16, Angela got a job singing at a nightclub for $60 a week, but had to lie about her age and claim to be 19 in order to get the job.
Her big film break came when she was 17 when she secured a supporting role in the film Gaslight, which starred Ingrid Bergman. Her age was an issue here, too, as her character was a smoker. The studio had to delay filming the scenes requiring her to smoke until she’d turned 18. She received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress for that role. By the age of 20, she’d netted two nominations, and held that record until at least 2010.
In 1961, she played Elvis Presley’s mother in Blue Hawaii, even though she was only 10 years older than him. The following year, she played a mother again, this time that of Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate, who was just three years younger than she was.
She was married twice. Her first husband was actor Richard Cromwell, who was 15 years older than Angela. It wasn’t a successful marriage and the couple divorced in less than a year. They did stay friends, however, until Cromwell died in 1960. Soon after the divorce, Angela became involved with actor Peter Shaw, who’d recently split up from actress Joan Crawford. At the time, the Church of England refused to marry divorced people so they married in the Church of Scotland.
When the family home in Malibu was destroyed by a fire in 1970, Angela and Shaw moved to Ireland. They bought a house called Knockmourne Glebe in County Cork.
As of 2022, Angela holds the record for hosting the most Tony Award shows, having done so five times. Neil Patrick Harris and Hugh Jackman have hosted 4 times each.
She received more than 12 nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series on Murder, She Wrote, but never won. She was the only actor to appear in all 264 episodes.
Beta
(Combat Team Series #2)
Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?
Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.
Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream.
Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.
Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.
Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.
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