Tony Award-winning producer and actress Angela Lansbury’s younger brother Edgar Lansbury has died. He was 94. The news of Lansbury’s demise was confirmed by his son David Lansbury. He breathed his last on Thursday at his home in Manhattan, as per The Hollywood Reporter.
Edgar won a Tony for Best Play in 1964 for his Broadway debut The Subject Was Roses. His Broadway credits also include Godspell, The Only Game in Town, Look to the Lilies, The Magic Show, American Buffalo, Lennon, and the 1974 Broadway revival of Gypsy.
Lansbury’s first Broadway production, the intense family drama The Subject Was Roses, 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.
Invited by future Hill Street Blues actor Charles Haid to a performance of Godspell at the New York experimental theater club La MaMa in March 1971, Lansbury and his frequent producing partner Joseph Beruh took the musical to the off-Broadway Cherry Lane Theatre in 1971 and then to Broadway in 1976. (Victor Garber played Jesus in the 1973 Columbia adaptation.)
In 2007, he was presented with the John Houseman Award from The Acting Company to honor his commitment to the development of classical actors and a national audience for the theater. In addition to David, an actor, survivors include his second wife, artist Louise Peabody (they married in 2008), and his other children, James (an assistant director on Seinfeld), George, Michael, Brian and Kate.