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Angela Lansbury’s enormous talent and appeal expanded beyond the movie and theatrical stage. The actress — who died Tuesday at age 96 — leaves an indelible small-screen legacy as Jessica Fletcher, TV’s forever favorite sleuth on “Murder, She Wrote.”
The top-rated series, which ran for an astounding 12 seasons and 264 episodes on CBS (1984-96), and spawned four made-for-TV movies, brought Lansbury and her whimsical world of Cabot Cove into America’s living rooms.
Each week, millions of viewers settled in to watch Jessica, a widowed mystery writer and amateur detective, solve a murder in her small town on the coast of Maine, aided by folksy Sheriff Amos Tupper (Tom Bosley) and town doctor Seth Hazlitt (William Windom). Both, like Lansbury, were veteran comfortable-shoe actors who lended gravitas to the series, which garnered Lansbury 12 Emmy nominations, but, for reasons none can fathom, no winning statuettes. Go figure. I sure can’t.
But Lansbury didn’t need a piece of metal to know that loyal viewers, no matter what age, loved Fletcher almost like they would a beloved aunt or grandmother.
