Top 50 Angela Lansbury Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Better to be busy than to be busy worrying.”

— Angela Lansbury

2. “You just have to be open and ready, and let it all happen.”

— Angela Lansbury

3. “I’m the bionic woman. I have a very strong constitution, and I take excruciatingly good care of myself.”

— Angela Lansbury

4. “I’m not going to be dancing with the stars at this stage in my life. But I want to dance and bop around, and I did, and I can.”

— Angela Lansbury

5. “Here I am, I still go on, you know, like the tides.”

— Angela Lansbury

6. “I don’t care whether it’s a chance meeting or playing a role that you thought was totally wrong but you did it anyway. It will often turn out to be the thing that will lead you to the role which is sublime.”

— Angela Lansbury

7. “Everything I did actually helped to build the revenue, shall we say, of experience, which enabled me to play a variety of roles as I got older.”

— Angela Lansbury

8. “I’ve worked with the greatest actors, and they’re all gone. This is what’s so desperate to me.”

— Angela Lansbury

9. “I honestly feel that “Murder, She Wrote” stands alone, as many of the other great shows of the past 35, 40 years do. It stands alone, and it’s still on. It’s still all over the world, “Murder, She Wrote,” Jessica Fletcher and “Murder, She Wrote.””

— Angela Lansbury

10. “Believe me, it jabs you. When you’re on the side of buses and New York loves you, you love to go out there every night. It’s like a race. Curtain opens, out you go, and New York is yours.”

— Angela Lansbury

11. “My mother was one of the most beautiful women, I have to say, of her generation. She was absolutely lovely. She was a very, extremely sensitive, Irish actress. She came from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and she came to London, and she was sort of discovered by several people.”

— Angela Lansbury

12. “I honestly consider that the greatest gift to me, is the reaction that I get from my work. That is a given which I never, ever take for granted. But to be given that by audiences, individuals, on the street, in the theater, is an extraordinary feeling.”

— Angela Lansbury

13. “It’s better not to try to learn all the lines by rote. It’s a very bad idea, in fact. You have to do it by using the process, and as I say, the process is to learn during rehearsals, and that’s how you’ll do it.”

— Angela Lansbury

14. “We all have levels of performance.”

— Angela Lansbury

15. “I have heard Mr. Romney’s speech’s many times on television and the radio and I have even read his book No Apology: The Case for American Greatness and I must say that out of all the gentleman running for the presidency Mr. Romney is, in my opinion, the best one to fit the bill.”

— Angela Lansbury

16. “I think of myself as a journeyman actress. I will attempt almost anything that I think that I can bring off. It could be almost anything.”

— Angela Lansbury

17. “The collaboration really begins once the rehearsal starts. This is when the actor takes his place, because he becomes the one who is going to bring the words of the author off the page.”

— Angela Lansbury

18. “Actors are not made, they are born.”

— Angela Lansbury

19. “The Manchurian Candidate was the most important movie I was in, let’s face it.”

— Angela Lansbury

20. “My daughter used to sit and watch Murder, She Wrote. I tried to watch with her, but I fell asleep.”

— Angela Lansbury

21. “When I opened up in “Gaslight,” for instance, playing that narky maid, that all came about from my experience and my training up to that point, and so nothing was wasted.”

— Angela Lansbury

22. “I just went along for the ride. It was a God-given gift. It is. So you can’t say well, you wasted your life because you spent all of it acting, but I think gosh, I’ve never been to China, I’ve never been to Japan. I’ve never been to Yellowstone Park.”

— Angela Lansbury

23. “Louis B. Mayer and I got along like a house afire. He never chased me around his desk or tried anything with me. Of course, he never gave me any good parts, either.”

— Angela Lansbury

24. “Im in a very enviable position, being able to work like this 45 years later. Its always beginning! I never have a sense of finishing up, just new things beginning. When I die, theyre going to carry me off a stage.”

— Angela Lansbury

25. “The older I get, the more I realize how much I have missed because I was so busy entertaining that audience and so busy pursuing a career.”

— Angela Lansbury

26. “I made about 56 movies, I think. Not that many.”

— Angela Lansbury

27. “I can’t say that I deserve longlife; I don’t. I’ve just been around long enough. They say, “My God, she’s still here.””

— Angela Lansbury

28. “Mystery is something that appeals to most everybody.”

— Angela Lansbury

29. “Clint Eastwood is an extraordinary director because he knows the value of a buck. He knows where it will show on the screen.”

— Angela Lansbury

30. “The purpose of etiquette is to provide an easy set of rules which we can follow when we are in a hurry and want to make sure that we do not give offense to anybody.”

— Angela Lansbury

31. “Unfortunately, because the theater is always a poor relation when it comes to making the nut, it’s not easy to get the audience in to see a play, unless you have a name that is recognizable, that the audience wants to see and is prepared to pay the $125 to see.”

— Angela Lansbury

32. “I played the Piccadilly Theater with “Gypsy” and also the Old Vic, and I’ve done other shows in London, but not for 40 years.”

— Angela Lansbury

33. “It was an extraordinary experience to have backup singers like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. I have never experienced anything quite like it before and I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world.”

— Angela Lansbury

34. “The theater is magical and addictive.”

— Angela Lansbury

35. “I haven’t been back to London for 40 years to do a play, so to play Madame Arcati there, she would be tickled to death knowing that that was what I was doing. I hope she would. She was a wonderfully unique and very special, very darling woman.”

— Angela Lansbury

36. “The thing I always say is that I wasn’t going out reaching for roles, I wasn’t fighting for roles – people came to me. They always came to me.”

— Angela Lansbury

37. “Now the Gielgud Theater is a very famous old theater, because it was originally called the Globe, and the Globe is where my mother made her very first professional appearance in London, was at the Globe Theater.”

— Angela Lansbury

38. “I’m Angie to everybody, you’ve got to learn.”

— Angela Lansbury

39. “I was put under contract. A major studio. I got nominated for an Academy Award. Isn’t that ridiculous? I mean, at the age of 18!”

— Angela Lansbury

40. “I have never directed. But I think I could. I have thought about it. I’m a bit long in the tooth to start.”

— Angela Lansbury

41. “You learn the values that are inherent in the scene that the writer has written. You learn about who you as a character are in relation to those others who are working with you within that scene.”

— Angela Lansbury

42. “I very seldom said no, and I was aided and abetted by my husband, who realized that the one thing I could do was to be a very good actress, by his note.”

— Angela Lansbury

43. “A sitcom. I hate that word.”

— Angela Lansbury

44. “My memory about names and places now is dreadful. But lines, I can remember.”

— Angela Lansbury

45. “Well oddly enough, I liken the years at MGM, and I was there for about eight years, to doing stock, what we used to call repertory or stock, playing a whole bunch of different roles.”

— Angela Lansbury

46. “Psychologically, you learn the values that are inherent in the dialogue, and you learn to apply it to the way you read the lines. That’s acting. You’re not yourself saying those lines, you’re somebody else.”

— Angela Lansbury

47. “I started in London, as a kid. My mother knew I had sort of an inbred talent. She was an actress, so I inherited it from her. But I think I got a lot of it from my grandfather, who was a great politician.”

— Angela Lansbury

48. “They’re great devotees of Noel Coward in England, of course, he’s a favorite son, and so to play Coward in London is such fun, and anyway, the role is such a crazy lady. I just love doing that.”

— Angela Lansbury

49. “Actually the years when I was playing totally un – well, they were just roles that just went by the board, you wouldn’t want to know. But anyway, I’m glad I had that chance to build my craft.”

— Angela Lansbury

50. “I never regretted what I turned down.”

— Angela Lansbury