Angela Lansbury: Murder She Wrote star had family links with top politicians in UK and Australia

Angela Lansbury, the grande dame of American TV crime drama, had close family links with senior British politicians, including top Tory Penny Mordaunt.

Dame Angela was the cousin of the grandmother of the Portsmouth North MP, who this year came close to making the final two in the race for the Tory leadership and is now leader of the Commons.

The actress, who died on Tuesday aged 96, was best known in political circles, however, as the granddaughter of George Lansbury, who was leader of the Labour Party from 1932 until 1935, when he was succeeded by Clement Attlee.

Dame Angela’s father, Edgar Lansbury, was also a prominent politician and supporter of the Suffragettes. A member of both the Communist Party and the Labour Party, he was mayor of Poplar and was jailed over an illegal rates rebellion.

George Lansbury was first elected to parliament in 1910, but resigned his seat in 1912 to campaign for women’s suffrage – a cause Ms Mordaunt would have approved of – and he too was briefly imprisoned after publicly supporting militant action by the Suffragettes.

A Christian pacifist who was originally a radical Liberal, Lansbury became Labour leader with the party deeply split after the collapse of Ramsay MacDonald’s National government, but he never fought a general election as party leader.

He was ousted after a defeat in a bruising showdown at the 1935 Labour conference with Ernest Bevin, then transport and general workers union leader and later a giant in the Attlee government, over defence policy and opposition to fascism.

“My grandfather was a very large figure in my life as a child,” Dame Angela said in an interview in 1998.

“He was an extraordinary individual who garnered the admiration and love of the British labour movement, which he led, and because he was the most charismatic figure, a very kind simple plain man. He never drank, he never smoked.”

Further afield, former Australia prime minister Malcolm Turnbull has revealed that Dame Angela was his cousin.

In a tweet featuring a picture of the two at the theatre in Sydney, he wrote: “You first dazzled me when I was 4 & you were Aunty Angela making a movie in Australia.

“In later years we always had politics & showbiz to talk and laugh about. Rest in Peace dear Angie.”