Angela Lansbury^†

She crossed the Atlantic with her family as a teenager to escape the Blitz, then lied about her age at 16 to land a nightclub gig in Montreal. Four years later, MGM cast her in Gaslight (1944) and she earned an Oscar nomination at 18. The problem: Hollywood kept nominating her (three total, including The Manchurian Candidate in 1962) and then immediately forgetting about her when the awards were over. Broadway is where she finally became a star. Mame (1966) gave her what films never did, and she spent the next few decades collecting Tony Awards the way other people collect regrets.

Twelve Emmy nominations, one per season of Murder, She Wrote. Zero wins. The show drew over 40 million viewers per week at its peak, and she still couldn't get the Television Academy to give her a statuette. She was 58 when she bet her stage career on the procedural, a gamble her peers thought was below her. The honorary Oscar arrived eventually. In 2014, the Queen made her a Dame. The industry spent the last two decades of her life catching up on what it had owed her for decades.

The most unlikely story in her biography: in the late 1960s, her teenage daughter was drifting into Charles Manson's orbit. Lansbury relocated the entire family from Los Angeles to County Cork, Ireland for a year to pull her out. Her son Anthony was also dealing with substance abuse linked to the same scene. She mentioned the move in a 2014 Daily Mail interview, matter-of-factly, as if it were an obvious parenting call. Given what happened to Manson's actual followers in 1969, the math on that decision is hard to argue with.

She received the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement at the June 2022 Tony Awards, just months before she died. Disney designated her a Disney Legend and issued a formal tribute. Josh Gad noted she had touched four separate generations of audiences. Catherine Zeta-Jones, who had starred with her in A Little Night Music on Broadway, said their time together would 'forever be one of the joys of my life.'