Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen (U)

Angela Lansbury: A Life on Stage and Screen is an up-close and intimate portrait of one of America's most popular and admired actresses. It follows her career from its beginning in such films as Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, State of the Union, and The Manchurian Candidate to her conquest of Broadway. There she won additional kudos and cemented for all time her status as show business legend by starring in the smash-hit musical Mame. No Great White Way one-shot, she went on to win three other Tony Awards after Mame - in Gypsy, Dear World, and Sweeney Todd. In the 1990s, she introduced herself to a whole new generation in her role as Mrs. Potts in the animated feature Beauty and the Beast.Lansbury's life has been a fascinatingly active life. At an age when most young women are thinking about proms and Saturday night dates, Lansbury was already an MGM contract player. And this was after a brief career as a chanteuse in a Montreal nightclub. When others her age were deciding on a college major, she had already received two Academy Award nominations. Today, in her early seventies, she is a vital spirit who relishes each new creative endeavor.Still, Lansbury's career has had its share of failures and frustrations. In her twenties she was usually cast as "the other woman" or a middle-aged heavy. And her life, off camera, while mainly happy and fulfilled, has been touched by high drama. Her much-loved father passed away when she was only nine years old, and she came to America as a refugee from the London blitz. Her first marriage, to actor Richard Cromwell, was brief and controversial. Although her second marriage to Peter Shaw has been lasting and gratifying, their two children temporarily became victims of the 1960s drug culture.Ultimately, this book is a warm, deeply human portrait of a woman who continues to respond to the triumphs and tragedies of an extraordinary life.