Angela Lansbury Wanted to Play Romantic Leads in Her Youth but Said She Didn’t Have ‘Chocolate-Box Looks’

“I played so many hags 20 years older than myself in those early films that now everyone thinks I’m 80 years old!” Angela Lansbury said in a 1984 interview with PEOPLE

Despite early success, Angela Lansbury once recalled she never got a chance to play the roles she desired in her youth.

In a 1984 interview with PEOPLE, Lansbury — who died Tuesday at the age of 96 — said she felt she didn’t have the specific look of a typical romantic leading lady.

“I kept wanting to play the Jean Arthur roles, and [film producer] Mr. [Louis B.] Mayer kept casting me as a series of venal bitches,” she said at the time. At 22 years old, Lansbury already played the spiteful 35-year-old wife of Walter Pidgeon in If Winter Comes and a haughty 45-year-old publisher in State of the Union.

“I played so many hags 20 years older than myself in those early films that now everyone thinks I’m 80 years old!” she explained. “I never had those chocolate-box looks they wanted for romantic leads in those days.”

Reflecting on her career at the time, Lansbury also recognized the benefits of booking jobs based on her skills rather than appearances.

“As a character actor I achieved two things,” she told PEOPLE. “First, a healthy sense of my offscreen self and my private life, which I learned to keep separate from my screen characters. And second, a longevity of career that has outlasted many of the leading ladies who relied on their looks.”

In 1949, Lansbury married Peter Shaw, who later became an agent and MGM executive. In addition to raising his son David, she and Shaw also had two children: Anthony, now 70, and Deirdre, now 69.

She told PEOPLE at the time that she wished she “spent more time with my family and less time making mediocre movies in those days.”

By that time she was playing mother to Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii (1961), Warren Beatty in All Fall Down (1962), and even Laurence Harvey in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

This June, Lansbury received the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, marking her sixth Tony Award overall.

The Broadway legend won four Tonys between the time she appeared as Mame Dennis in 1966’s Mame and Mrs. Lovett in 1979’s Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street. She won a fifth Tony for 2009’s Blithe Spirit, her first Tony for her performance in a play versus a musical. In addition to winning multiple Tonys, she also received an honorary Oscar in 2013, and scored an impressive 12 Emmy nominations for her role as Jessica Fletcher in Murder, She Wrote, but never won.

“The children of Dame Angela Lansbury are sad to announce that their mother died peacefully in her sleep at home in Los Angeles at 1:30 a.m. today, Tuesday, October 11, 2022, just five days shy of her 97th birthday,” they said.

“In addition to her three children, Anthony, Deirdre and David, she is survived by three grandchildren, Peter, Katherine and Ian, plus five great grandchildren and her brother, producer Edgar Lansbury,” the statement added. “She was proceeded in death by her husband of 53 years, Peter Shaw. A private family ceremony will be held at a date to be determined.”