MURDER, SHE WROTE. GOODBYE TO JESSICA FLETCHER

Today, The Grandma has received some sad news. Angela Lansbury, the English actress who played the role of Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, has passed away.

 

The Grandma wants to remember Angela Lansbury and her role in this unforgettable work.

 

Murder, She Wrote is an American crime drama television series, created by Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson and William Link, starring Angela Lansbury, and produced and distributed by Universal Television for the CBS network.

The series focuses on the life of Jessica Fletcher, a mystery writer and amateur detective, who finds herself becoming involved in solving a series of murders that take place in the fictional town of Cabot Cove, Maine, as well as across the United States and abroad.

The program ran for 12 seasons from September 30, 1984 to May 19, 1996, for a total of 264 episodes, and included amongst its recurring cast Tom Bosley, William Windom and Ron Masak, as well as a vast array of guest cast members including Michael Horton, Keith Michell and Julie Adams.

The series proved a ratings hit during its broadcast, becoming a staple of CBS Sunday night TV schedule for around a decade, while achieving distinction as one of the most successful and longest-running television shows in history, averaging 25 million viewers per week in its prime.

In syndication, the series is still highly successful and popular throughout the world. For her role on the program, Lansbury was nominated for ten Golden Globes, winning four, along with nominations for 12 Emmy Awards, earning her the record for the most Golden Globe nominations and wins for Best Actress in a television drama series and the most Emmy nominations for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series. The series itself also received three Emmy nominations for Outstanding Drama Series, as well as six Golden Globe nominations in the same category, with two major wins.

More information: The Guardian

After the series finished in 1996, four television films were released between 1997 and 2003, with two point-and-click video games released for PC: one in 2009, and a sequel in 2012. A spin-off book series continues publication at present.

Series producers Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson and William Link developed the lead role for actress Jean Stapleton, who was initially somewhat interested but eventually turned it down, threatening the project.

Scrambling to find another major star, the producers thought Angela Lansbury would be perfect for the part of Jessica Fletcher but did not think that she would be interested in a television series. 

Earlier, she had acted in two film adaptations of Agatha Christie's mystery novels: as Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile (1978) and as Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980). When the latter film did poorly -despite an all-star cast including Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, and Tony Curtis- the offer for Lansbury to reprise Miss Marple in three more films never materialized.

When she made it known she would be available if the right project came along, the three creators sent her the script and almost immediately, Lansbury felt she could do something with the role of Jessica Fletcher. With Murder, She Wrote debuting on Sunday, September 30, 1984, the producers were able to parlay their mystery writer/amateur detective premise into a 12-year hit for CBS. It also made Lansbury, known previously for her motion picture and Broadway stage work, a household name for millions of television viewers. The title comes from Murder, She Said, which was the title of a 1961 film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Miss Marple novel 4:50 from Paddington.

The show revolves around the day-to-day life of Jessica Fletcher (née MacGill), a widowed and retired English teacher, who becomes a successful mystery writer. Despite fame and fortune, Jessica remains a resident of Cabot Cove, a small coastal community in Maine, and maintains her links with all of her old friends, never letting her success go to her head.

Murder, She Wrote was mostly filmed on sound stages at Universal Studios in Universal City, California (near Los Angeles). The series also filmed exterior shots and some episodes on location in the Northern California town of Mendocino, which stood in for the fictional Maine town of Cabot Cove.

More information: Angela Lansbury, Murder She Wrote in Honolulu

Mystery is something that appeals to most everybody.

Angela Lansbury

ANGELA LANSBURY, 'MURDER SHE WROTE' IN HONOLULU

Today, The Grandma wants to pay homage to one of her greatest friends, Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury), who celebrates her 95th birthday.

Jessica has visited The Stones in Honolulu and she has explained to them how she resolve a crime with Magnum P.I. some decades ago, when both of them stayed in Honolulu working together.

Jessica Beatrice Fletcher, born Jessica Beatrice MacGill, known as J.B. Fletcher when writing, is a character and the protagonist portrayed by award-winning actress Angela Lansbury on the American television series Murder, She Wrote. 

Fletcher is a best-selling author of mystery novels, an English teacher, amateur detective, criminology professor, and congresswoman.

More information: Eighties Kids

Angela Brigid Lansbury (October 16, 1925) is a British-Irish-American actress who has played many theater, television, and film roles.

Her career has spanned almost eight decades, much of it in the United States. Her work has received international attention. She is recognised as the earliest surviving Academy Award nominee and one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood.

Lansbury was born to Irish actress Moyna Macgill and British politician Edgar Lansbury, an upper-middle-class family in Regent's Park, central London. To escape the Blitz, in 1940 she moved to the United States with her mother and two brothers, and she studied acting in New York City. Proceeding to Hollywood in 1942, she signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 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 eleven further films for MGM, mostly in supporting roles such as National Velvet (1944), and The Harvey Girls. 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, was cited as being one of her finest performances and received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Moving into musical theater, Lansbury finally gained stardom for playing the leading role in the Broadway musical Mame (1966), which earned her a range of awards.

Amid difficulties in her personal life, Lansbury moved from California to County Cork, Ireland in 1970, and continued with her theatrical and cinematic appearances throughout the decade including starring in Disney's Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971) and the stage musicals Gypsy, Sweeney Todd, and The King and I.

Moving into television, she achieved worldwide fame as fictional writer and sleuth Jessica Fletcher in the American whodunit series Murder, She Wrote, which ran for twelve seasons from 1984 until 1996, becoming one of the longest-running 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. Since then, she has toured in a variety of international theatrical productions and continued to make occasional appearances in films including Beauty and the Beast (1991), Nanny McPhee (2005) and Mary Poppins Returns (2018).

Lansbury has received an Honorary Oscar and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) and has won five Tony Awards, six Golden Globes, and an Olivier Award. She has also been nominated for numerous other industry awards, including the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress on three occasions, and various Primetime Emmy Awards on eighteen 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 has been the subject of three biographies.

In the 1960s, The New York Times referred to Lansbury as the First Lady of Musical Theatre. Lansbury described herself as an actress who could also sing, with Sondheim stating that she had a strong voice, albeit with a limited range.

Lansbury's authorised biographer Martin Gottfried described her as an American icon, with a practically saintly public image.

More information: Twitter @_AngelaLansbury

 Mystery is something that appeals to most everybody.

Angela Lansbury