Angela Lansbury, an acclaimed and beloved star of stage, film and television, will be honored this year with a special Tony Award for lifetime achievement.
Lansbury, 96, who has already won five competitive Tony Awards, will receive the lifetime achievement award on June 12, when this year’s ceremony is set to take place at Radio City Music Hall and to be broadcast on CBS.
Lansbury first appeared on Broadway in 1957, in a farce called “Hotel Paradiso,” and in 1964 she starred in her first Broadway musical, “Anyone Can Whistle,” a flop that is remembered mostly because the songwriter was Stephen Sondheim.
She was already a three-time Oscar nominee, notably for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1962, when she landed her breakout Broadway role, starring as the free-spirited title character in “Mame” in 1966. She won her first Tony Award for that performance.
She starred in several Sondheim musicals, winning Tony Awards for originating the role of theater’s most famous stage mother, Momma Rose, in “Gypsy,” as well as the scheming pie shop owner Mrs. Lovett in “Sweeney Todd.” Her most recent Tony nomination, in 2010, was for her work in a revival of yet another Sondheim musical, “A Little Night Music.”
Lansbury also won Tony Awards for a short-lived musical called “Dear World” and a revival of the Noël Coward play “Blithe Spirit.”
Her latest Broadway appearance was in a 2012 revival of “The Best Man,” a play by Gore Vidal.
Lansbury has also had an extensive career on film — she memorably voiced Mrs. Potts in “Beauty and the Beast” — and on television, where she was the longtime host of “Murder, She Wrote.”
The Tony Awards are to start June 12 at 7 p.m. Eastern with a one-hour segment streamed on Paramount+, hosted by Darren Criss and Julianne Hough, followed at 8 p.m. Eastern by a three-hour segment broadcast on CBS hosted by Ariana DeBose.
