#moyna macgill

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THE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY (Robert Siodmak, 1945)

HE STRANGE AFFAIR OF UNCLE HARRY is another interesting Siodmak, his second collaboration with producer Joan Harrison, not as successful as PHANTOM LADY. Still, it’s a fascinating film, influenced by MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS, bordering on the Gothic, tinged with perversity and marred by a duplicitous ending no one is meant to believe. Milquetoasty George Sanders lives with two sisters in the vast…

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The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945)

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1926 Irish actress Moyna MacGill, oldest daughter Isolde and baby Angela Lansbury. From Art Deco, Avant Garde and Modernism, FB.

[kwebtv]

The Shape of the River - CBS - May 2, 1960

A presentation of "Playhouse 90" Season 4 Episode 15

Drama

Running Time: 90 Minutes

Written by Horton Foote

Produced By Fred Coe

Directed By Boris Sagal

Music by Jerry Goldsmith

Stars:

Franchot Tone as Samuel Clemens

Leif Erickson as William Dean Howells

Katharine Bard  as Livy Clemens

Shirley Knight  as Susy Clemens

Katherine Squire as Katie Leary

James Bell as John Briggs

Larry Gates as Henry Rogers

Philip Coolidge as Albert Bigelow Paine

Elizabeth Patterson as Woman at Hannibal House

Jane McArthur as Jean Clemens

Nancy Rennick as Clara Clemens

Sandy Kenyon at Man at Hanibal House

Moyna Macgill  as Nurse

Len Lesser as Photographer

Doris Karnes as Maid

Sandra Harrison as Jenny

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Bad movie I have The Uninvited 1944

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Texas, Brooklyn & Heaven (The Girl from Texas) (1948) William Castle

June 12th 2022

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The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry | Robert Siodmak | 1945

Moyna MacGill, Geraldine Fitzgerald

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Angela Lansbury and her mother, Moyna MacGill, between takes of Kind Lady

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The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945) | Robert Siodmak

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DAME ANGELA LANSBURY (1925-Died October 11th 2022,at 96). British American actress and singer who played many film, theatre and television roles. With one of the longest careers in the entertainment industry, her career spanned over 80 years, much of it in the United States; her work also received much international attention. Upon the death of Olivia de Havilland in July 2020, Lansbury became the earliest surviving Academy Award nominee and one of the last stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States, there studying acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed to MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in 11 further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finer performances leading her to her third Academy Award nomination. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her her first Tony Award and established her as a gay icon.Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television in 1984, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, contributing to animated films like Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Don Bluth's Anastasia (1997). She toured in a variety of international productions and continued to make occasional film appearances such as Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018).Lansbury received an Honorary Academy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the BAFTA, a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award and five additional Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She also was nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on 18 occasions, and a Grammy Award. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. Her Murder,She Wrote,co star,Ron Masak,who played the cadillac driving sheriff of Cabot Cove, Mort Metzger,died just nine days later,on October 20th.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Lansbury

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Dame Angela Lansbury and her mother, Moyna MacGill knitting on the set of The Harvey Girls (1946). (X)

[justforbooks]

Although she was born in London, and retained a classic English poise all her life, Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, was a Hollywood and Broadway star for more than seven decades, and one who was completely unclassifiable. On her film debut, she played Ingrid Bergman’s cockney maid in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944) and was promptly nominated for an Oscar, though she was never to win one. She graduated to play Laurence Harvey’s evil, possibly incestuous, mother – although she was only three years older than Harvey – in John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962), and then a dotty amateur witch in Disney’s follow-up to Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971).

This versatility, allied to her natural grace, vitality and chastely appealing features – her eyes were full, blue and unblinking, her face almost perfectly round, her mouth a cupid’s bow from the studio era – propelled her to stage stardom in Jerry Herman’s Mame (1966) and, in London at the Piccadilly theatre in 1973, as the show-stopping Mama Rose in Gypsy, by Jule Styne, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents.

Lansbury had been initially reluctant to assume Ethel Merman’s mantle in Gypsy but, like Merman, she gave the performance of her life, full of steel and tenderness in equal measure. Her performance was more nuanced and needy than Merman’s; the critic Robert Cushman described “a slow steady build towards magnificence”.

But she became best known worldwide for Murder, She Wrote, an American television series running from 1984 to 1996, with four subsequent TV films. She played the incisive and level-headed Jessica Fletcher, a retired English teacher, mystery writer and amateur sleuth in the coastal town of Cabot Cove, Maine, a sleepy location with a criminal body count as delightfully high and unlikely as in Midsomer Murders.

“It really was a fluke success,” Lansbury said, “and came at a time when that kind of family entertainment seemed needed.” She added that, of all the characters she played, Fletcher was the one most like herself: intuitive and sensitive, a voice of calm and reason in a troubled time. She gradually assumed ownership of the CBS series. Peter Shaw, whom she had married in 1949, was joint director of the production company; her son, Anthony, and stepson, David, were executive producers, her brother Bruce was supervising producer.

Family was always of paramount importance to Lansbury. She came from strong, muscular stock: her father, Edgar Lansbury, was a lumber merchant and one-time member of the Communist party and mayor of Poplar (his father was George Lansbury, a reforming leader of the Labour party); her mother, Moyna MacGill, was an Irish actor who took Angela to the Old Vic theatre in London from an early age. One of her cousins was Oliver Postgate, the British animator best known for Bagpuss.

She was educated at South Hampstead high school for girls and trained at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art. Her father died in 1934, and her mother merged her family – Angela and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce – with that of a former British Army colonel in India, Lecki Forbes, under one roof in Hampstead.

It was not a happy arrangement.

At the outbreak of war, Moyna decamped with her children to New York, and Angela continued her training for two more years at the Feagin school. While her mother toured Canada in a variety show for the troops, Angela did cabaret turns in Montreal. When Moyna’s agent sent her to Hollywood for an audition, she decided to move the children out there with her.

Nothing much happened at first, so mother and daughter took jobs as sales clerks at Bullocks Wilshire, the art deco department store in Los Angeles, while continuing to audition. Angela was still only 17 when she landed the role in Gaslight, and this set a pattern of playing older than her age. A notable exception was The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), in which she played Sibyl Vane, the chirpy music-hall singer, a role that brought her second Oscar nomination; through her co-star, Hurd Hatfield, she met her future husband, Shaw. She had been married previously, for just nine months, to the actor Richard Cromwell, who was almost twice her age.

By this point a Hollywood fixture, Lansbury played Elizabeth Taylor’s older sister in National Velvet (1944), sang Jerome Kern’s How’d You Like to Spoon With Me? in Till the Clouds Roll By (1946), fooled with Danny Kaye in The Court Jester (1955), peaked in glory in The Manchurian Candidate, with her third and final Oscar nomination, and joined another great cast list in The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), which David Lean took over as director from George Stevens.

Lansbury took American citizenship in 1951, and made her Broadway debut opposite Bert Lahr in Feydeau’s Hotel Paradiso in 1957, following with Helen in Shelagh Delaney’s A Taste of Honey in 1960 and, most significantly, Cora Hooper Hoover, the corrupt mayor in Sondheim and Laurents’s 1964 flop Anyone Can Whistle. The show, which has since become a concert favourite, closed in a week, but Lansbury came out of it with flying colours, commended by critics for her agility and engaging personality; she was even likened to a young Bette Davis.

This led to her Mame acclaim, and her first Tony award. Lansbury played Auntie Mame, a free-spirited woman who picks herself off the floor of the stock market crash to sing Bosom Buddies (Lansbury duetted with Bea Arthur) and who ultimately recoups her fortunes by marrying a southern aristocrat. She won a second Tony in Herman’s next show, Dear World (1969), a musical based on Jean Giraudoux’s The Madwoman of Chaillot, in which she appeared to be dressed in “a wedding cake made of cobwebs”, according to the critic Walter Kerr.

A belated London debut followed in 1972, when she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in Edward Albee’s All Over, playing the mistress of a dying man, locked in battle with Peggy Ashcroft as his wife. She took Gypsy back to Broadway in 1974 for a few months, winning her third Tony, then joined the National theatre at the Old Vic in 1975 to play a fairly youthful, glamorous Gertrude to Albert Finney’s thickset, plainspoken and powerful Hamlet, directed by Peter Hall; the production was part of the opening season in the National’s new home on the South Bank in 1976.

Back on Broadway, she hit another great milestone in Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s Sweeney Todd (1979), playing the gleefully cannibalistic, pie-making Nellie Lovett (and winning a fourth Tony) opposite Len Cariou’s demon barber in a dark and scintillating production by Hal Prince that played on Broadway for a year before touring the US for another 11 months.

Before Murder, She Wrote, a series of starry film roles included John Guillermin’s Death on the Nile (1978) with Peter Ustinov, David Niven, Bette Davis, Mia Farrow and Maggie Smith; Guy Hamilton’s The Mirror Crack’d (1980), in which she did some sleuthing stretches by playing Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, with Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, Tony Curtis and, in his penultimate movie, Rock Hudson; Wilford Leach’s rocked-up The Pirates of Penzance (1983), opposite Kevin Kline as the Pirate King; and Neil Jordan’s wonderfully weird The Company of Wolves (1984), in which she played yet another eccentric old granny figure.

She did voices for two animated movies – Beauty and the Beast (1991, for Disney) and Anastasia (1997, for 20th Century Fox) – but was not in a feature movie again until she played Great Aunt Adelaide in Kirk Jones’s Nanny McPhee (2005), starring and written by Emma Thompson. Subsequently, she was with Jim Carrey in Mr Popper’s Penguins (2011).

For many years, Lansbury kept a home in County Cork, Ireland, where she and Shaw would spend two months each year while maintaining their base in Brentwood, Los Angeles. She rented an apartment in New York in 2007 to return to Broadway in Terrence McNally’s Deuce, a specially crafted two-hander for her and Marian Seldes about former tennis partners reliving past glories while watching a match at Flushing Meadow, and switching their heads from side to side during the rallies.

The play was not a huge hit, but Lansbury was electrifying and was greatly moved by the affection with which audiences greeted her. She had not been on Broadway since a possibly ill-advised 1983 revival of Mame.

Regarded by now as a national treasure, in 2009 she won her fifth Tony as Madame Arcati in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit, wearing a bright red wig and “with a superfluity of bad jewellery, the gait of a gazelle and a repertory of poses that bring to mind Egyptian hieroglyphs”, wrote Ben Brantley of the New York Times.

At the end of the same year in New York, she appeared for six months as Madame Armfeldt in Trevor Nunn’s Menier Chocolate Factory revival of Sondheim and Wheeler’s A Little Night Music, winning plaudits for her nostalgic litany of fading qualities in Liaisons: “Where is style? Where is skill? Where is forethought? Where’s discretion of the heart? Where’s passion in the art? Where’s craft?”

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences compensated for her lack of an Oscar with an award for “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” in 2013, and the following year she was made a dame, and took Madame Arcati to the Gielgud theatre in London. She was Aunt March in the BBC’s adaptation of Little Women (2017), and in 2018 she both appeared as a balloon-seller in Mary Poppins Returns, and joined up with another member of that cast, Dick Van Dyke, as guardian angels in the Christmas tale Buttons.

Shaw predeceased her in 2003, and she is survived by Anthony, David, her daughter, Deirdre, three grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and her brother Edgar.

🔔 Angela Brigid Lansbury, actor, born 16 October 1925; died 11 October 2022

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

[vintage1981]

Tribute to Angela Lansbury (1925 - 2022) | In Memoriam

Dame Angela Brigid Lansbury DBE (16 October 1925 – 11 October 2022) was an Irish-British and American actress and singer who played many film, theatre, and television roles. Her career, one of the longest in the entertainment industry, spanned over 80 years, much of it in the United States; her work also received much international attention. At the time of her death, she was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.

Lansbury was born to an upper-middle-class family in central London, the daughter of Irish actress Moyna Macgill and English politician Edgar Lansbury. To escape the Blitz, she moved to the United States in 1940, studying acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed to MGM and obtained her first film roles, in Gaslight (1944) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), earning her two Oscar nominations and a Golden Globe Award. She appeared in 11 further MGM films, mostly in minor roles, and after her contract ended in 1952 she began supplementing her cinematic work with theatrical appearances. Although largely seen as a B-list star during this period, her appearance in the film The Manchurian Candidate (1962) received widespread acclaim and is cited as being one of her finer performances, leading her to her third Academy Award nomination. Moving into musical theatre, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her her first Tony Award and established her as a gay icon.

Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with a variety of theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout that decade. These included leading roles in the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I, as well as in the hit Disney film Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). Moving into television in 1984, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for 12 seasons until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running and most popular detective drama series in television history. Through Corymore Productions, a company that she co-owned with her husband Peter Shaw, Lansbury assumed ownership of the series and was its executive producer for the final four seasons. She also moved into voice work, contributing to animated films like Disney's Beauty and the Beast (1991) and Don Bluth's Anastasia (1997). She toured in a variety of international productions and continued to make occasional film appearances such as Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

Lansbury received an Honorary Academy Award, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the BAFTA, a Lifetime Achievement Tony Award and five additional Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She also was nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on 18 occasions, and a Grammy Award. In 2014, Lansbury was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. She was the subject of three biographies.

Lansbury died at 1:30am PDT on 11 October 2022, five days before her 97th birthday, at her home in Los Angeles. Her children issued a statement saying that Lansbury had died "peacefully in her sleep.

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Dame Angela Lansbury, 'Murder, She Wrote' and 'Beauty and the Beast star dies at 96.

Angela Brigid Lansbury was born on 16 Oct 1925, in London, the daughter of actor Moyna Macgill and timber executive Edgar Lansbury. The London-born actor took her life’s final bow as one of the most decorated players in stage history.

Both her father and grandfather (George Lansbury) were active in liberal British politics. Edgar Lansbury was mayor of the London borough of Poplar, while George Lansbury served as Labour Party leader from 1932-34.

Lansbury, then 19, received a best-supporting actress Oscar nom for her very first film role, as the young maid Nancy in the home of Charles Boyer and his new bride Ingrid Bergman in George Cukor’s Gaslight (1944).

Angela Lansbury, played Mame and won five Tony Awards, received an honorary Oscar and starred for 12 seasons as Jessica Fletcher in 'Murder, She Wrote’ Lansbury, received an Emmy nomination for best actress in a drama series for each and every season of Murder, She Wrote.

Angela Lansbury Singing the "Beauty and the Beast" Theme Will Take You Back. In case you forgot, Lansbury voiced teapot/mom Mrs Potts in the animated film, though you'd probably be able to figure that out for yourself instantly upon hearing her.

Queen Elizabeth II bestowed the DBE (Dame Commander of the British Empire) honour on Lansbury in 2014 during a ceremony at Windsor Castle.

https://news.sky.com/story/angela-lansbury-murder-she-wrote-actress-dies-aged-96-12718271

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The actor Angela Lansbury, best known as Jessica Fletcher in the TV series Murder, She Wrote and for numerous film and theatre roles, has died aged 96. She died in her sleep on Tuesday, just five days before her 97th birthday, her family has announced.

Lansbury was born in London in 1925, to Irish actor Moyna Macgill and Edgar Lansbury, a politician and timber merchant who died when she was nine. Following the Blitz, Lansbury, two of her siblings and her mother relocated to the US, where she trained at New York’s Feagin School of Drama and Radio. She went on to receive an Oscar nomination for her first film role, aged 19, in the 1944 film Gaslight, and starred in the hit film National Velvet, as well as a steady stream of other MGM productions during the 1940s.

After more minor roles, Lansbury came to prominence once again in the 1962 film The Manchurian Candidate, however it wasn’t until 1966, when she took the lead title in the musical Mame, that she reached widespread prominence. A lead role as Rose in the West End transfer of Stephen Sondheim’s Gypsy followed, as did roles in hit films and further musical theatre productions, including Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd.

However, she will be best known to many for playing the role of Jessica Fletcher in the US crime drama Murder, She Wrote. An international success, the whodunit drama ran from 1984 and 1996 and made a global star of the actor who played its lead, a crime writer and would-be detective. She also exec produced the show, via Corymore Productions, a production company she started with her late husband Peter Shaw, who died in 2003. Lansbury also notably voiced Mrs Potts in the 1991 Disney film Beauty and the Beast.