Angela Lansbury Trivia
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50 free Angela Lansbury trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Angela Lansbury worked for nearly eighty years, from a teenage Oscar nomination for Gaslight to a Broadway comeback in her eighties. These trivia questions about Angela Lansbury cover the MGM years, her Tony-winning run in Mame, Gypsy and Sweeney Todd, twelve seasons as Jessica Fletcher, and the voice of a singing teapot. Every answer is sourced, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which city was Angela Lansbury born in 1925?
London
London. Her birthplace is often given as Poplar in the East End, where her father had been mayor, but she insisted she was born across town in Regent's Park.
Q 02Angela Lansbury's mother, the actress Moyna Macgill, was born in which city?
Belfast
Belfast. In 1940 Moyna Macgill sold everything she could and took Angela and her twin brothers across the Atlantic by ship to escape the wartime bombing.
Q 03Angela Lansbury earned an Oscar nomination for her film debut in which 1944 thriller?
Gaslight
Gaslight. Lansbury was a teenager working in a department store when she was cast as the sly maid, and the film's title later gave English a verb for making someone doubt their own sanity.
Q 04Who played the tormented heroine Paula in Angela Lansbury's 1944 debut film?
Ingrid Bergman
Ingrid Bergman won the Best Actress Oscar for the role. To give her version a clear run, the studio had demanded that every print of a 1940 British film of the same play be destroyed.
Q 05Who directed Angela Lansbury's 1944 debut film?
George Cukor
George Cukor. Five years earlier he had been replaced as director of Gone with the Wind, yet he became famous as a 'woman's director' who drew award-winning performances from his actresses.
Q 06Angela Lansbury's 1945 film The Picture of Dorian Gray adapted a novel by which author?
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde. By her own account, the teenage Lansbury went to audition for it and was rushed off to test for another film first; as the jilted singer Sibyl Vane she then earned her second Oscar nomination in two years.
Q 07Angela Lansbury lost the 1945 supporting-actress Oscar to Anne Revere, her co-star in which film?
National Velvet
National Velvet. Revere won as the mother of Elizabeth Taylor's horse-mad heroine, with Lansbury as the older sister, and six years later the Hollywood blacklist halted Revere's film career.
Q 08Which studio signed the teenage Angela Lansbury to a seven-year contract?
MGM
MGM. It kept casting the young Lansbury as older or nastier women, and she later said she had 'wasted' eight years there because the studio had no idea what to do with her.
Q 09In a 1961 musical, Angela Lansbury played the mother of which singing star, less than a decade her junior?
Elvis Presley
Elvis Presley. Lansbury was in her mid-thirties when she played his fussing mother in Blue Hawaii, and she later admitted she took the part only because she was desperate for work.
Q 10Angela Lansbury played Semadar in which 1949 epic?
Samson and Delilah
Samson and Delilah. That year she married Peter Shaw: her first marriage, at 19 to the actor Richard Cromwell, had ended within a year, but this one lasted until Shaw's death in 2003.
Q 11Angela Lansbury moved her family to Ireland partly because her daughter had fallen in with which cult leader's circle?
Charles Manson
Charles Manson. Lansbury said both her children had fallen into hard drugs in Malibu, so in 1970 she bought a house in Ireland where the family could start again.
Q 12Angela Lansbury played an assassin's mother in which thriller?
The Manchurian Candidate
The Manchurian Candidate. Lansbury was only three years older than Laurence Harvey, who played the assassin she mothers and manipulates, and the chilling 1962 performance brought her a third Oscar nomination.
Q 13In which 1980 Agatha Christie film did Angela Lansbury play Miss Marple?
Q 21Angela Lansbury's third Tony came for playing which role in Gypsy?
Rose
Rose. The revival began in 1973 as the show's British premiere, co-produced by her brother Edgar, and the monstrous stage mother won Lansbury her Tony when it reached Broadway.
Q 22In the original 1979 Sweeney Todd, Angela Lansbury played Mrs. Lovett opposite which actor in the title role?
Len Cariou
Len Cariou. He and Lansbury each won a Tony for the show and left it together in March 1980, when George Hearn and Dorothy Loudon took over the two roles.
Q 23Who directed Angela Lansbury in the original Broadway Sweeney Todd?
Harold Prince
Harold Prince. The Broadway giant rarely made films, but one of his few, the 1970 comedy Something for Everyone, had already starred Lansbury as a countess.
The Mirror Crack'd
The Mirror Crack'd. It proved a rehearsal: her later television sleuth, a village busybody who outwits the local police, is often described as Miss Marple moved to small-town America.
Q 14Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury's hit series, was co-created by the duo behind which earlier TV detective show?
Columbo
Columbo. Richard Levinson and William Link expected little from a mystery with an older heroine: 'We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,' Levinson recalled.
Q 15Who wrote the score for Angela Lansbury's Broadway hit Mame?
Jerry Herman
Jerry Herman. His next musical for Lansbury, Dear World, closed within four months, yet it still won her a second Tony.
Q 16Angela Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 opposite which Wizard of Oz star?
Bert Lahr
Bert Lahr, the Cowardly Lion, played a builder who lures her character, another man's wife, to a hotel in the farce Hotel Paradiso. Her good reviews led her to do more theatre, where she finally became a star.
Q 17In 1986, Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote staged a two-part crossover with which other detective series?
Magnum, P.I.
Magnum, P.I. The story began on his show in Hawaii and ended on hers, where the private eye is arrested for murder and the visiting mystery writer has to clear his name.
Q 18Who was cast instead of Angela Lansbury in the 1974 film version of Mame?
Lucille Ball
Lucille Ball. The studio wanted a bigger box-office name than the stage Mame, to Lansbury's lasting disappointment, but the film drew poor reviews and was not a success.
Q 19Dear World, which won Angela Lansbury a second Tony, adapted which Jean Giraudoux play?
The Madwoman of Chaillot
The Madwoman of Chaillot. Lansbury was 43 when she played its 75-year-old countess, one more in a long line of parts far older than she was.
Q 20In which 1971 Disney musical did Angela Lansbury star as Eglantine Price?
Bedknobs and Broomsticks
Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Disney reunited the makers of Mary Poppins for it, from the director to the songwriting Sherman brothers, and handed Lansbury the lead.
Q 24Which All in the Family star turned down the lead in Murder, She Wrote before Angela Lansbury took it?
Jean Stapleton
Jean Stapleton showed guarded interest, then withdrew. The show's makers thought the project was dead until Lansbury let it be known that she might try television.
Q 25Which short-lived Sondheim show was Angela Lansbury's first stage musical?
Anyone Can Whistle
Anyone Can Whistle closed after nine performances in 1964, but it changed her career: 'I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,' she said, 'so I learned how to belt.'
Q 26On Murder, She Wrote, Angela Lansbury played which amateur sleuth?
Jessica Fletcher
Jessica Fletcher. Lansbury had real say over the character: when executives suggested giving the widowed novelist a love interest, she rejected the idea outright.
Q 27Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote character lived in which fictional town?
Cabot Cove
Cabot Cove, a seaside village in Maine. In later seasons the writers moved its most famous resident to Manhattan for part of each year, and many of the murders went with her.
Q 28What was the job of Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote character before she became a mystery novelist?
School teacher
School teacher. In the first episode the widowed former English teacher has written a mystery as a hobby, and her nephew secretly sends it to a publisher, launching her new career.
Q 29Angela Lansbury's Murder, She Wrote aired on which US network?
CBS
CBS. Few expected a mystery about a bicycle-riding widow to survive, yet it became a huge hit and in its second season outdrew Steven Spielberg's much-hyped Amazing Stories.
Q 30In 1995, Murder, She Wrote was moved to Thursdays from which night of the week?
Sunday
Sunday. For eleven seasons it ranked among television's top shows there; shifted to Thursdays it sank to 58th, and the final episode was pointedly titled 'Death by Demographics'.