Angela Lansbury was married for 54 years. What she did after losing him is a lesson in love and grief

Angela Lansbury was married for 54 years. What she did after losing him is a lesson in love and grief 💔

Angela Lansbury was a Hollywood star by 19, nominated for an Oscar for her very first film, Gaslight, in 1944. But her early love life didn’t match her career. At 19, she married actor Richard Cromwell, who was 15 years older, and the marriage ended after a year. They stayed friends until his death in 1960, and she later admitted she’d been naive.

Then, at MGM, she met Peter Shaw, a fellow British actor who later became a talent agent. They married in London in 1949, and what followed was a partnership that lasted more than half a century.

They had two children, Anthony and Deirdre, and Peter even produced her hit series ‘Murder, She Wrote.’

“We had the perfect relationship,” Angela said in 2014, twelve years ago. “Not many people can say that. He was everything to me: we were partners at work as well as husband and wife and lovers.”

She was honest about the reality, too.

“I had a wonderfully happy marriage to Peter. We were both doers, we had the same sort of energy. We did everything for the family, and that was our mutual thrust at all times,” she told the Belfast Telegraph.

In 2003, Peter passed away at their home in Brentwood, California, from congestive heart failure. Angela was devastated and withdrew from the world for a time, but she never lost her sense of what she needed.

“I just knew I had to wait, and the moment would arrive when I had to look at the surface again and find a way to mend the rift inside my soul,” she explained.

The moment did arrive. Over the next two decades, she kept working, played Jessica Fletcher for fans worldwide, and was named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 2014. But those closest to her say work was never her priority.

“She always put family first,” her stepson David Shaw told Closer.

Angela Lansbury passed away peacefully at home in Los Angeles on October 11, 2022, five days before her 97th birthday.

Fifty-four years of marriage, almost twenty years of missing him, and a lifetime of putting family first.

She waited for the moment to begin again, and she found it ❤️