Actress Angela Lansbury, who passed away at age 96 on Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022, left behind a tremendous body of work in film, television and stage — but that's not all.
She also left behind words of wisdom and inspiration — and spoke directly and honestly about her career and life over the years.
"I worked much harder on a character in the theater than I do playing Jessica," she told Barbara Walters in 1985 during a television interview about her then-famous TV character, Jessica Fletcher, the sleuthing star, mystery writer and retired English teacher whose escapades were followed in "Murder, She Wrote."
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"Jessica's much closer to home for me … She's an easygoing woman," Lansbury told Walters.
"It's just that I can relate to her," she added.
Lansbury also told Walters of the early leading ladies who always got their man in the movies — roles that she, as a young character actor, did not often get — "I desperately wanted to look like the girls who sat at the makeup tables next to me at MGM. And I envied them."
She also said bluntly of the ingénue in those films, "She had a better dressing room than I did. Things like that. Silly how those things really rankle when you're young," she added, laughing.
Here are a whole range of other quotes and comments by Lansbury over the years, which display her self-awareness and her overall life wisdom, collected from a variety of sources.
1. "Better to be busy than to be busy worrying."
2. "I believe age should not stop you from keeping on."
3. "I never regretted what I turned down."
4. "I’m astonished at the amount of stuff I managed to pack into the years that I have been in the business."
5. "Work in the theater just keeps revitalizing me — it keeps giving me the excitement and the fun of something new coming up and that's a great gift."
6. "If one keeps one’s health and strength and you’re pretty damn careful about how you conduct your life, then you tend to hang on for many years."
7. "Jessica [Fletcher, her character in ‘Murder, She Wrote’] has extreme sincerity, compassion, extraordinary intuition. I’m not like her. My imagination runs riot. I’m not a pragmatist. Jessica is."
8. "Actors are not made, they're born."
9. "The theater is magical and addictive."
10. "I think of myself as a journeyman actress. I will attempt almost anything that I think that I can bring off. It could be almost anything."
11. "Bringing humor and bringing happiness and joy to an audience is a wonderful opportunity in life, believe me."
12. "I was a very serious teenager … and I considered the work to be the most important thing and I concentrated on that. I was a bit goody-goody. I didn't fool around at all, which is a bit of a shame, I think. I've missed on a lot of fun, but I've made up for it later."
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13. "Women in motion pictures have always had a difficult time being role models for other women. They’ve always been considered glamorous in their jobs."
14. "I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop … So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it," she told Katie Couric on CBS in 2009.
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15. "I really can't honestly give any tips [for success] beyond hang onto your dream. Hang onto what you want, what you feel you want to achieve and go for it. We are all the victims of our own talent and our own shortcomings sometimes, and we have to be aware of those things because they will trip us up and stop us from achieving what our aims are."
16. "I've never been particularly aware of my age. It's like being on a bicycle — I just put my foot down and keep going."
17. "We all have levels of performance."
