Producer, Angela Lansbury, her brother was 94

Edgar Lansbury, Tony-winning producer and younger brother of famed actress Angela Lansbury who guided the Broadway and big screen versions of The subject was roses And Divine spell, is dead. He was 94 years old.

He died Thursday at his home in Manhattan, his son David Lansbury said. The Hollywood Reporter.

Lansbury also produced the popular Broadway revival in 1974-1975. Gypsy which starred his sister in a Tony-winning turn and worked on other films including The wild party (1975), directed by James Ivory.

Angela Lansbury, winner of five Tony Awards and star of The Murder She Wrotedied on October 11, 2022 at the age of 96. His twin brother, television producer Bruce Lansbury, died in February 2017 at the age of 87.

Lansbury's first Broadway production, the intense family drama The subject was roses, which opened in 1964, ran for two years and won a Pulitzer Prize and the Tony for best play. Written by Frank Gilroy and directed by Ulu Grosbard, it starred Martin Sheen as a returning veteran and son of warring parents played by Jack Albertson and Irene Dailey.

Sheen, Albertson, Gilroy and Grosbard then reprized their roles for the MGM version, with Albertson confirming his Tony win by winning the Supporting Actor Oscar over Patricia Neal as his wife.

Invited by the future Hill Street Blues actor Charles Haid at a performance of Divine spell at New York's theater club La MaMa in March 1971, Lansbury and frequent producing partner Joseph Beruh took the musical to Broadway's Cherry Lane Theater in 1971, and then to Broadway in 1976. (Victor Garber played Jesus in the 1973 Columbia adaptation.)

The former set designer also received Drama Desk nominations in 1977 and 1998, respectively, for producing American buffalowith Robert Duvall in David Mamet's Broadway debut and in that of Douglas Carter Beane. As the bees drown in honey.

In 2007, he received The Acting Company's John Houseman Award to honor his commitment to developing classic actors and a national audience for theater. (He has served on its board for more than four decades since its founding in 1972.)

Edgar George Lansbury was born in London on 12 January 1930. His mother, Moyna Macgill, was a Belfast-born stage actress and his father, also Edgar, was a politician and timber merchant. His grandfather was George Lansbury, a former leader of the Labor Party in England and an MP.

As World War II intensified, he arrived in New York in 1940 aboard a refugee boat with his sister, brother and mother (his father died of stomach cancer when Edgar was 4 years). They lived in upstate New York and then Greenwich Village before he and Bruce attended the Choate School in Wallingford, Connecticut.

After the twins joined their mother and Angela in Los Angeles — both women had by then landed acting contracts at MGM — he graduated from University High School, served in the U.S. Army for two years and became American citizen in 1954.

Lansbury studied drawing and painting at the Otis Art Institute and UCLA, then landed a job as art director at CBS Television City. He worked as artistic director on Red Skeleton Hour, Climax!, Studio One, Performance hall 90 And The defenders and on the 1962 film War huntingwith John Saxon.

In 1967, he directed Blue crowna CBS drama starring Frank Converse as an amnesia victim searching for his true identity.

With Beruh, Lansbury took a 10-year lease for a hotel ballroom on Broadway at 76th Street in New York and designed and built the 400-seat Promenade Theater, which opened in 1969. The venue hosted hundreds of plays before closing its doors in 2006.

Lansbury's production resume also included Broadway projects. The only game in townthat of Doug Henning The magic show, The night that made America famous And Lennon; off-Broadway revivals of Waiting for Godot And A long day's journey into the night (with a cast including Robert Ryan, Stacy Keach and Geraldine Fitzgerald); and the 1977 film Blue sun.

In his later years he turned to paint And sculpture.

Besides David, an actor, survivors include his second wife, artist Louise Peabody (they married in 2008), and his other children, James (assistant director on Seinfeld), George, Michael, Brian and Kate.