Angela Lansbury Named TCM's 'Star of the Month'

Turner Classic Movies has named Angela Lansbury its Star of the Month. Wednesdays throughout January will be devoted to the star, featuring some of her many film roles during primetime and into the early morning hours.

According to TCM, Lansbury was chosen because she "has never allowed herself to be typecast, despite the Hollywood Studio System's best efforts. She's played evil mothers, innocent girls, witches, scheming maids, free-spirits, two popular detectives and even a singing teapot."

Lansbury - who will return to Broadway in this spring's revival of THE BEST MAN - has enjoyed an unprecedented career, first as a star of motion pictures, and then as an award-winning stage actor in New York and London. Most recently, she appeared as Madame Armfeldt in the 2009 revival of A Little Night Music, and before that as Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit, for which she won her fifth Tony Award, as well as Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle Awards. She performed in 2006 in Terrence McNally's Deuce, for which she was also nominated for a Tony Award. She made her Broadway debut in 1957 as Bert Lahr's wife in 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. A year later, she starred in her first musical, Anyone Can Whistle. Lansbury returned to Broadway in triumph in 1966 in Mame, for which she won her first Tony Award. She received 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). From 1984-1996 she starred as Jessica Fletcher, mystery-writing amateur sleuth, on "Murder, She Wrote," the longest-running detective drama series in the history of television, a role that won her four Golden Globe Awards. In 1994, Queen Elizabeth named her a Commander of the British Empire, and in 2000 she received the Kennedy Center Honors.

Catch the star on TCM this month in "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "Gaslight," "The Manchurian Candidate" and more; for a complete listing of films that will be aired, click here.