Angela Lansbury Young: 10 Rare Photos of the Beloved Star Before ‘Murder She Wrote’

Angela Lansbury, 16 years old, looks like the very definition of '40s loveliness in this full-skirted floral print dress in 1945.

In this sweet early candid, Lansbury looks at a family scrapbook with her younger twin brothers, Bruce and Edgar. Bruce would go on to be a TV producer and screenwriter (he even worked on Murder, She Wrote!) while Edgar also worked as a producer and art director. 

At the beginning of Lansbury's movie career, she was under contract with MGM. She'd stay with the studio until her contract ended in 1952, and she was seen as more of a b-list star than a leading lady during this period. However, as you can clearly see in this early headshot, she had a captivating gaze and would soon develop an impressive body of work.

In this glam 1945 shot, Lansbury poses in her dressing room while wearing a stunning red sequined dress — a la a young Marilyn Monroe. In an NPR interview, Lansbury reflected on her early days, saying, "It was a hard adjustment for me. I wanted to play the game, you know? I wanted to be like the rest of the girls. I was still enough of an adolescent in my heart. Although, I always say that I sort of missed my adolescence. But part of me wanted to be like the girls who were under contract. But I really wasn't. I just didn't fit in that mold. And I know now that it was a difficult period of trying to be what I really wasn't." 

One of Lansbury's earliest roles was in The Picture of Dorian Gray, a cinematic adaptation of Oscar Wilde's classic 1890 novel.

In 1946, Lansbury played her first American character when she co-starred (alongside the legendary Judy Garland) as a honky-tonk saloon singer in The Harvey Girls, a Technicolor musical.

In The Private Affairs of Bel Ami, Lansbury co-starred as a young window who becomes entangled with a cad (George Sanders) in 19th-century Paris.

Lansbury played Queen Anne in The Three Musketeers. In an interview with NPR, Lansbury said she was often cast as characters who were older than she actually was at the time. As she recalled, "I got to dress up and look kind of staggering and terrific with all this paraphernalia that was laid on me. But I was still way out of my age range. So I was never going to get to play the girl next door. And I was never going to be groomed to be a glamorous movie star." (Click through to read how a young Betty White also struggled with finding her niche in Hollywood)

In 1948, Lansbury starred alongside the iconic Hollywood duo of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in State of the Union. Lansbury, who was 22, paid 48-year-old Tracy's mistress. Hepburn, who Lansbury called, "a totally unique woman, in every respect," handpicked the young British actress for the role.

In 1949, Lansbury married actor and producer Peter Shaw. The couple would stay together until Shaw's death in 2003. They had two children, Anthony, born in 1952, and Deirdre, born in 1953. Looking back at her early career, Lansbury told People,"Frankly I wish I had spent more time with my family and less time making mediocre movies in those days."