Angela Lansbury Set to Headline THE CHALK GARDEN, Fall 2013

Angela Lansbury, whose career has spanned close to seven decades in film and theatre, is currently gearing up for an Australian tour of DRIVING MISS DAISY opposite James Earl Jones. The tour, which launches in February, will wrap up in June 2013 - but don't expect Lansbury to take too much down time. She tells the Sydney Morning Herald that she'll be back to performing next fall in New York, in a new production of Enid Bagnold's THE CHALK GARDEN.

"I'd rather be on the stage than off, to be honest with you, and most actors would agree with me," Lansbury adds. "You want to keep the engine running and not relax too much."

Lansbury most recently appeared on Broadway in this year's starry revival of Gore Vidal's THE BEST MAN. In 2009, she appeared as Madame Armfeldt in the 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.