Angela Lansbury Dies at 96, ‘Murder She Wrote’ Star Rescued Her Family From Charles Manson

Dame Angela Lansbury, the award-winning actress, died at the age of 96 on Tuesday. Lansbury was a London-born actress who moved to the United States during the onset of World War II. She debuted in the 1944 film “Gaslight” and became a household name playing a novelist in the 1984 television drama show “Murder, She Wrote”.

Lansbury died on Tuesday, just five days shy of her 97th birthday, in her Los Angeles home at 1:30 AM. Her children said in a statement that she died “peacefully in her sleep.” The actress is remembered for her various roles on screen and on stage, including the character of Nellie Lovett in the 1979 musical “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” for which she won a Tony. Over the course of her career spanning eight decades, Lansbury won six Golden Globes, five Tonys and a Laurence Olivier Award.

But the actress lived quite a dramatic life off screen as well. Twice in her life she was made to flee a country she called home. In 1940, she moved to the United States in order to escape the Blitz. Then in the 1960s, Lansbury's teenage daughter Deidre Shaw became a cult member of the Charles Manson “family."

Manson, who died in 2017 at the California State Prison, Corcoran (COR), was a criminal and musician who led a cult called the “Manson Family” during the late 1960s. In 1971, he was convicted on seven counts of first-degree murder, including the murder of actress Sharon Tate.

"There were factions up in the hills above Malibu that were dedicated to deadly pursuits. It pains me to say it but, at one stage, Deidre was in with a crowd led by Charles Manson. She was one of many youngsters who knew him — and they were fascinated. He was an extraordinary character, charismatic in many ways, no question about it," said Lansbury in a 2014 interview with the Daily Mail, adding that both her daughter and her son, Anthony, had been using drugs at the time.

"Certainly, I have no doubt we would have lost one or both of our two if they hadn't been removed to a completely different milieu," she said in the interview. "It started with cannabis but moved on to heroin.”

In an effort to rescue her daughter from the sway of Manson, and to distance her children from the influences of Los Angeles, California in the late 1960s, she packed up her family and moved them to County Cork, Ireland in 1970. The actress told the Daily Mail that she chose Ireland because it was the birthplace of her mother and her children “wouldn’t be exposed to any more bad influences.”

"Anthony pulled right out of his bad habits quite quickly. It took Deidre… a little longer but she finally got married and she and her husband now live in Los Angeles, where they run their own Italian restaurant," the actress said in the 2014 interview.

"Peter and I had no idea what had been going on. But then we had no experience of drugs. We didn't know the significance of finding a pipe in a drawer. Why would we? And when we did, we didn't know how to help them. Nor were there any experts back then who could offer advice to the parents of kids from good families who were using, and sometimes overdosing on, drugs. It was like an epidemic,” the actress said.

The iconic actress’ family wrote in a statement on Tuesday that she is survived by her three children Anthony, 70, Deirdre, and David, Lansbury’s stepson. She is also survived by three grandchildren and five great-grandchildren, as well as her brother, the film and television producer Edgar Lansbury.