Los Angeles - (AFP) - British-American actress Angela Lansbury died Tuesday at the age of 96, after a busy career during which she was known for her role as a writer and investigator in the TV series "Murder She Root" and has appeared in a number of musicals and in more than 60 films since the forties of the twentieth century. .

The family of the British actress, who acquired American citizenship, said in a statement distributed to a number of American media outlets that she "passed away peacefully in her sleep at her home in Los Angeles (...) just five days before her ninety-seventh birthday."

For her entire career, Lansbury deserved an honorary Oscar in 2014, after she was nominated for an Oscar for her first role in the movie "Gaslight" when she was seventeen.

Soon after, she was nominated for an Oscar again in 1946 for “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in 1946, and a third time for “The Manchurian Candidate” in 1963, and for these two roles she won two Golden Globe Awards.

She also won four Golden Globe Awards for the American series “Murder She Root”, in which she starred when she was sixty, and in which she embodied the role of an author of police novels and an amateur detective.

Mordred She Root, which ran for 264 episodes between 1984 and 1996 on CBS and then around the world, won numerous Emmys and Golden Globes. And the actress, when she was ninety-one, expressed her desire to take on the role of Jessica Fletcher for the last time, after she was paid about $ 300,000 per episode.

Lansbury was born on October 16, 1925 in London to a family of politicians (her grandfather George Lansbury headed the Labor Party in the thirties) and actors. She moved to the United States in 1940 to escape World War II after the death of her father.

Her mother, Irish actress Moina McGill, opened the door for her to get her first role in "Hantise," a psychological thriller by George Cukor with Ingrid Bergman produced in 1944.

The role of the seductive and annoying maid earned her an Academy Award nomination in a supporting role and a seven-year contract at MGM Studios. She was then 19 years old.

However, Lansbury was often sidelined by being cast in minor roles, portraying characters much older than her.

"I used to do bigger roles when I was younger because I wasn't very pretty on the big screen," she told BBC radio in 2014. "I'm a character actor."

For example, she assumed the role of the mother of a tour guide, who was embodied by Elvis Presley, who was only ten years younger than her, in the musical "Blue Hawaii" in 1961.

Frustrated by her slow career in Hollywood, Lansbury took to the stage on Broadway in the late 1950s.

She became a star of the stage when she landed the title role in the 1966 musical Mame, about wealthy New Yorkers during the Depression, and won her the first of five Tony Awards she won during her career, most recently in 2009.