"1938: Michael Terrence McNally is born Nov. 3 in St. Petersburg, FL, to Hubert and Dorothy (née Rapp) McNally, transplanted New Yorkers who run a seaside bar and grill.
1946-9: ... spends Saturday afternoons listening to Live from the Met on the radio and attends his first two Broadway shows (Annie Get Your Gun, starring Ethel Merman, and The King and I, starring Gertrude Lawrence), which make a lasting impression.
1949-56: The family relocates a final time to Corpus Christi, TX. During his years at W. B. Ray High School (1952-56), McNally is mentored by Maurine McElroy, an extraordinary English teacher who regularly invites select students to her home to read poetry and listen to classical music.
1956-60: After being encouraged by Mrs. McElroy to attend college out of state, McNally wins a scholarship to attend Columbia College as a journalism major, returning to Corpus Christi summers to work as a cub reporter for the Times Caller. In New York City McNally begins a lifelong practice of attending the theater and opera several nights a week. After meeting twenty-nine-year-old Edward Albee, the nineteen-year-old McNally moves in with the budding playwright. They will remain a couple for about five years.
1961-62: While working as a stage manager at the Playwrights Unit of the Actors Studio, McNally is recruited by director Molly Kazan to travel with and tutor the two teenaged sons of Nobel Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck and his third wife, Elaine, as the family embarks on what is expected to be a year-long cruise around the world.
Following their return to New York, Steinbeck suggests that McNally write the book for Here’s Where I Belong, an ill-fated musical adaptation of Steinbeck’s East of Eden.
1964-65: Early versions titled Bump and There Is Something Out There are workshopped by Albee-Barr Wilder in New York and by the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis before And Things That Go Bump in the Night opens on Broadway April 26, 1965.
... begins relationship with Bobby Drivas, actor. McNally writes his next several plays for Drivas, tailoring Where Has Tommy Flowers Gone? (1971) to showcase Drivas’s talents. Drivas will go on to direct McNally’s The Ritz and Bad Habits, as well as star in Albee’s The Man With Three Arms (1983), and will remain one of McNally’s closest friends until Drivas’s death from AIDS-related causes in 1986.
1969: Next, written for actor James Coco, becomes McNally’s first critical and financial success. It is directed by Elaine May, whom McNally credits with giving him a crash course in play-writing.
1975: The Ritz premieres Jan. 20 at the Longacre Theatre in New York City, and runs for 400 performances. Richard Lester’s 1976 film version retains the original cast.
1978-84: McNally commutes between New York and Hollywood as he collaborates with television producer Norman Lear on “The Education of Young Harry Bellair, Esq.,” a situation comedy set in early eighteenth century London that draws upon the conventions of Restoration comedies of manners. Although “Education” and several other pilots fail to find network support, McNally’s adaptation of John Cheever’s “The Five-Forty-Eight” for PBS (1979) earns critical acclaim, and his Mama Malone runs on CBS in summer 1984.
1985-95: ... embarks on a decade-long collaboration with the Manhattan Theatre Club (MTC). MTC will premiere a string of McNally hits—Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), The Lisbon Traviata (1989), Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), A Perfect Ganesh (1993), and Love! Valor! Compassion! (1994)—making for one of the most successful pairings of playwright and theater company in twentieth-century American theater history.
1985-2001: As Vice President of the Dramatists Guild, McNally is active in theater community events to raise awareness of the toll that AIDS is taking on the arts community, and in protests to save three beaux-arts theater buildings threatened with demolition to make way for Times Square’s Marriot Marquis Hotel and Theater ... in plays like Some Christmas Letters, The Last Mile, the Tony Award-winning Love! Valour! Compassion! and the Emmy Award-winning Andre’s Mother, McNally becomes a major voice during the AIDS epidemic. And in Ghost Light and Dedication, he examines America’s failure to preserve its theater heritage.
1993: McNally wins the first of his four Tony Awards for his book for the musical Kiss of the Spider Woman. Subsequent Tony Awards will be for Love! Valour! Compassion! (1995), Master Class (1996) and the book for the musical Ragtime (1998). Earlier McNally had won the Hull-Warriner Award—notable because it is bestowed by dramatists upon their fellow dramatists—in 1974 for Bad Habits, in 1987 for Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune and in 1989 for The Lisbon Traviata. In addition, he has won four Drama Desk Awards, two Lucille Lortel Awards, and two Obie Awards.
1996: Inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.
1998: Awarded an honorary degree by The Juilliard School for “invaluable contribution to the theater.” ...
2000: Dead Man Walking, based on the 1993 memoir of the same title by Sister Helen Prejean, with music by Jake Heggie, premieres at the San Francisco Opera and becomes the most frequently produced English language opera across the globe ...
2011: Receives the Dramatists Guild Lifetime Achievement Award ...
2018: McNally is inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters as one of only five playwrights included in this body. A documentary of his life and career titled Every Act of Life (dir. Jeff Kaufman) premieres at the Tribeca Film Festival.
In honor of McNally’s eightieth birthday, New York City Mayor de Blasio declares November 4 “Terrence McNally Day.” The official proclamation praises McNally for having served “as a civil rights activist, championing marriage equality and tackling issues that impact the LGBTQ community and people with HIV/AIDS,” and concludes: “Through his thought-provoking and witty plays, musicals, and operas, Terrence has engaged and uplifted generations of diverse audiences in New York and far beyond, and at age 80, the untiring artist is still creating new works.”
2020: McNally dies in Sarasota, Florida."
"Angela Lansbury has enjoyed a career without precedent. Her professional career spans more than 75 years, during which she has flourished, first as a star of motion pictures, then as a four-time Tony Award-winning Broadway musical star, and most recently as the star of "Murder, She Wrote," the longest running detective drama series in the history of television.
She is the winner of five Tony Awards, her Broadway debut was in 1957 in Hotel Paradiso, followed by A Taste of Honey (1960), Anyone Can Whistle (1964), and in Mame (1966), winning her first Tony. She also won Tonys for Dear World (1968), Gypsy (1974) and Sweeney Todd (1979). After a 23-year hiatus, she returned to Broadway in Deuce (2007) followed by Blithe Spirit (2009) winning a fifth Tony; A Little Night Music (2010), The Best Man (2012). In 2013 she toured Australia in Driving Miss Daisy, and in 2014 she reprised Blithe Spirit in London, winning the Olivier Award.
Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on October 16, 1925. Her father, Edgar Isaac Lansbury, was a timber merchant. Her mother, Moyna Macgill, was a popular actress. At age ten, Angela saw John Gielgud as "Hamlet" at the Old Vic and vowed that someday she would become an actress. She attended the Webber-Douglas School of Dramatic Art in London.
The great influence on Angela's young life was her grandfather, the Right Honorable George Lansbury, a prominent pacifist, and leader of the British Labor Party form 1931-35. "He was a fierce pacifist, and great friend of Gandhi's, yet all his desperate efforts to seek peace came to naught. He went to see Hitler personally. He came to America to see Eleanor Roosevelt. He died in 1940, really of a broken heart."
That same year, in order to escape the London Blitz, Moyna Macgill (who had driven an ambulance during the early days of the aerial Battle of Britain) evacuated fourteen-year-old Angela and her younger twin brothers, Edgar and Bruce, to the United States. (Their father had died when Angela was nine.) Together with 600 other young refugees, they escaped with the last boatload of children to leave the British Isles before German submarines made further Atlantic crossings impossible.
The family lived in Putnum County for a year, during which time Angela commuted to the Feagin School of Dramatic Arts in Manhattan. She received her first professional job at age sixteen when she performed a cabaret act in Montreal.
Eventually the family relocated in Los Angeles, where Moyna Macgill hoped to find work in the movies. Instead, it was seventeen-year-old Angela who landed a seven-year contract at MGM after director George Cukor cast her as Nancy, the menacing maid, in "Gaslight." Her cunning performance won her a 1944 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actress. The following year she received a second nomination, again as Best Supporting Actress, as the doomed Sybil Vane in "The Picture of Dorian Gray." That poignant role earned her a Golden Globe Award.
Lansbury has appeared in 44 motion pictures to date. They include such classics as "National Velvet," "The Harvey Girls," Frank Capra's "State of the Union," Cecil B. DeMille's "Samson and Delilah," "The Court Jester," "The Long Hot Summer," "The Manchurian Candidate" (for which she received a second Golden Globe Award, the National Board of Review Award and her third Academy Award nomination), "The World of Henry Orient" and "Death on the Nile" (a second National Board of Review Award). In 1991 she was the voice of Mrs. Potts in the Disney animated feature, "Beauty and the Beast," and in 1997 she was the voice of the Grand Duchess Marie in the animated movie, "Anastasia."
The actress made her Broadway debut in 1957 when she starred as Bert Lahr's wife in the French farce, "Hotel Paradiso." In 1960 she returned to Broadway as Joan Plowright's mother in the season's most acclaimed drama, "A Taste of Honey" by Shelagh Delaney.
In March 1963, Lansbury told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, "This sounds corny as hell, but I really have an enormous amount of dancing and rhythm in me. This is going to come out one of these days--then watch out. I've never been an entertainer, and I want to be. I've done the acting; now I want to entertain."
One year later, she starred on Broadway in her first musical. "Anyone Can Whistle" closed after only nine performances. But Lansbury returned to New York in triumph in 1966 as "Mame." She played the role for two years on Broadway and later to sellout audiences in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
"Mame" earned Lansbury the first of her unprecedented four Tony Awards as Best Actress in a Musical. She received the others as the Madwoman of Chaillot in "Dear World" (1968), as Mama Rose in the 1974 revival of "Gypsy" and as Mrs. Lovett in "Sweeney Todd" (1979). In 1978 she starred as Mrs. Anna for a limited engagement of "The King and I.
Concurrent with her musical ventures, Lansbury continued to act in serious dramas. In 1971 she returned to London to appear in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Edward Albee's "All Over." In 1975, again in London, she played Gertrude to Albert Finney's Hamlet in the National Theater production. In 1976 she acted in two Albee one-act plays, "Counting the Ways" and Listening," at the Hartford Stage Company. As the actress once told an interviewer, "If you want to keep revitalizing yourself as an artist, you have to go where the work is. That's the way to continue to find new audiences."
She was to find her largest audience on television. Although Lansbury had acted in live dramas during "the golden age of television" in the 1950's in such shows as Robert Montgomery Presents and Lux Video Theatre, when she starred as Mrs. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in the 1982 mini-series "Little Gloria...Happy at Last," she had not acted on television in seventeen years. She followed that Emmy-nominated performance with roles in the mini-series "Lace" and "A Christmas Story: The Gift of Love."
From 1984-1996 she starred as Jessica Fletcher, mystery-writing amateur sleuth, on "Murder, She Wrote." In 1992, Lansbury added to her responsibilities by becoming the series' executive producer.
During the past decade she has also found time to star in the motion picture-for-television, "Mrs. 'Arris Goes to Paris" (directed by Anthony Shaw), "Shootdown," "The Love She Sought" and the Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation, "The Shell Seekers." She developed a video and co-wrote a book, both titled Positive Moves, about fitness and well-being.
After "Murder She Wrote" concluded its twelve season run in May 1996, Lansbury returned to her theatrical roots by starring in "Mrs. Santa Claus," the first original musical for television in four decades.
In 1997 Lansbury appeared in "South by Southwest," the first of a series of two hour "Murder, She Wrote" movies for CBS and has recently completed "The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax," also for CBS.
She has been unstinting of her time with scores of civic involvements, ranging from the American Red Cross to the Salvation Army. As a member of the AmFAR National Council, her energies in the war against AIDS have raised several millions of dollars. Most recently she has become the National spokesperson for Childreach.
In 1982 she was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. In 1990 she received an honorary doctorate in humanities from Boston University. In 1992 she received the Silver Mask for Lifetime Achievement from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. In 1994 she was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II. In 1996 she was inducted into the T.V. Hall of Fame, and in 1997 she was given a Lifetime Achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild. She has been nominated for 16 Emmy Awards (twelve for "Murder, She Wrote"). She has won six Golden Globe Awards (four for "Murder, She Wrote") and has been nominated for an additional eight. In September 1997 President Clinton presented her with the National Medal of the Arts. In November of 1999, Meadows School of the Arts at Texas' Southern Methodist University presented Angela with their Lifetime Achievement Award.
Angela and her husband Peter were married in 1949. Peter enjoyed a successful career both as an agent at the William Morris Agency, and as a top production executive at M-G-M. In 1972 he resigned to form their own company, Corymore Productions. They have worked together ever since. Angela and Peter have three grown children, Deirdre, Anthony and David and three young grandchildren."