Producer, Angela Lansbury Brother Was 94

Edgar Lansbury, the Tony-winning producer and youthful brother of famed actress Angela Lansbury who guided the Broadway and big-screen variations of The Topic Was Roses and Godspell, has died. He was 94. 

He died Thursday at his dwelling in Manhattan, his son David Lansbury informed The Hollywood Reporter.

Lansbury additionally produced the favored 1974-75 Broadway revival of Gypsy that starred his sister in a Tony-winning flip and labored on different movies together with The Wild Celebration (1975), directed by James Ivory.

Angela Lansbury, winner of 5 Tony Awards and star of Homicide, She Wrote, died on Oct. 11, 2022, at age 96. His twin brother, TV producer Bruce Lansbury, died in February 2017 at age 87. 

Lansbury’s first Broadway manufacturing, the extraordinary household drama The Topic Was Roses, opened in 1964, ran for 2 years, and gained a Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for finest play. Written by Frank Gilroy and directed by Ulu Grosbard, it starred Martin Sheen as a returning veteran and son of warring dad and mom performed by Jack Albertson and Irene Dailey.

Sheen, Albertson, Gilroy and Grosbard then reprised their roles for the MGM model, with Albertson backing up his Tony victory by profitable the Oscar for supporting actor reverse Patricia Neal as his spouse.

Invited by future Hill Road Blues actor Charles Haid to a efficiency of Godspell on the New York experimental theater membership La MaMa in March 1971, Lansbury and his frequent producing accomplice Joseph Beruh took the musical to the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in 1971 after which to Broadway in 1976. (Victor Garber performed Jesus within the 1973 Columbia adaptation.)

The onetime scenic designer additionally acquired Drama Desk nominations in 1977 and 1998, respectively, for producing American Buffalo, starring Robert Duvall in David Mamet‘s Broadway debut, and Douglas Carter Beane’s As Bees in Honey Drown.

In 2007, he was offered with the John Houseman Award from The Performing Firm to honor his dedication to the event of classical actors and a nationwide viewers for the theater. (He served on its board of administrators for greater than 4 many years since its begin in 1972.)

Edgar George Lansbury was born in London on Jan. 12, 1930. His mom, Moyna Macgill, was a Belfast-born stage actress, and his father, additionally Edgar, was a politician and timber service provider. His grandfather was George Lansbury, a former Labor Celebration chief in England and a member of Parliament.

As World Battle II was heating up, he got here to New York in 1940 aboard a refugee boat along with his sister, brother and mom (his dad had died of abdomen most cancers when Edgar was 4). They lived in upstate New York after which in Greenwich Village earlier than he and Bruce attended the Choate College in Wallingford, Connecticut.

After the twins joined their mother and Angela in Los Angeles — each ladies had landed performing contracts at MGM by then — he graduated from College Excessive College, served within the U.S. Military for 2 years and have become a U.S. citizen in 1954.

Lansbury studied drawing and portray on the Otis Artwork Institute and at UCLA, then landed a job as artwork director at CBS Tv Metropolis. He labored as an artwork director on The Crimson Skelton Hour, Climax!, Studio One, Playhouse 90 and The Defenders and on the 1962 movie Battle Hunt, starring John Saxon.

In 1967, he produced Coronet Blue, a CBS drama that starred Frank Converse as an amnesia sufferer in the hunt for his true identification.

With Beruh, Lansbury took a 10-year lease on a lodge ballroom on Broadway at 76th Road in New York and designed and constructed the 400-seat Promenade Theater, which opened in 1969. The venue hosted lots of of performs earlier than shuttering in 2006.

Lansbury’s producing résumé additionally included the Broadway tasks The Solely Recreation in City, Doug Henning’s The Magic Present, The Evening That Made America Well-known and Lennon; off-Broadway revivals of Ready for Godot and Lengthy Day’s Journey Into Evening (with a solid that included Robert Ryan, Stacy Keach and Geraldine Fitzgerald); and the 1977 movie Blue Sunshine.

In his later years, he turned to portray and sculpture.

Along with David, an actor, survivors embody his second spouse, artist Louise Peabody (they married in 2008), and his different kids, James (an assistant director on Seinfeld), George, Michael, Brian and Kate.