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Angela Lansbury (1925–2022) was an Irish-British and American actress who had an extensive career in film, television, radio, and on the stage. Lansbury made her film debut in the 1944 psychological thriller Gaslight. Her performance as a conniving Cockney maid received critical acclaim, and she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The following year she played a tragic music hall singer in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture and received another nomination for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar. Lansbury played lead roles in the radio adaptations of the novels Of Human Bondage and Pride and Prejudice for NBC University Theatre in the late 1940s. She appeared in a further 11 MGM productions but in minor roles often as an older villanous woman, which she was dissatisfied by, commenting, "I kept wanting to play the Jean Arthur roles, and Mr Mayer kept casting me as a series of venal bitches". Lansbury instructed her agent to terminate her contract in 1952 however she continued to be typecast during the 1950s and supplemented her film career with appearances on various television anthology series including Lux Video Theatre, Four Star Playhouse, Climax!, and Playhouse 90.

In 1957, she made her Broadway debut in Hotel Paradiso and followed this with A Taste of Honey (1960). Lansbury played a ruthlessly ambitious mother in the 1962 political thriller The Manchurian Candidate, for which she received her third nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. She became a musical star as the title character in Mame in 1966 for which she garnered the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. She following this by playing Countess Aurelia in the musical Dear World (1969) for which she won her second Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical. Two years later, she appeared in the musical film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). For her performance as burlesque entertainer Gypsy Rose Lee in Gypsy she received a third Tony Award for Best Actress in a Musical which she followed by portraying Gertrude in a 1975 West End adaptation of Hamlet and Mrs. Nellie Lovett in Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979). For the latter, she received a fourth Tony.

Lansbury made her television breakthrough in the 1980s by starring as detective and writer Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote (1984). The show ran for 264 episodes over 12 years and was a critical and commercial success. Lansbury received 12 consecutive Emmy nominations during its run and became one of the highest paid television stars with a reported salary of $200,000 per episode in later seasons. In the latter part of her career, she made appearances in Disney films... and returned to the stage with lead roles in Blithe Spirit and Driving Miss Daisy. Lansbury died in 2022, her last role was a cameo in the murder mystery Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. The New York Times described her as "The First Lady of Musical Theatre" and Broadway dimmed their lights in tribute.