Angela Lansbury Says Acting is 'All About Imagination'

At age 89, Broadway legend Angela Lansbury is returning to the stage and a role for which she won her most recent Tony Award.

The Oscar and Tony Award-winner is reprising her role as the medium Madame Arcati in Noel Coward's farce BLITHE SPIRIT for the third time, having played the role on Broadway in 2009, the West End this past spring, and now a four-city tour of North America.

"It's a role that I enjoy playing tremendously," Lansbury told Fox News, calling the role one "that really, really makes the audience sit up and say, 'Oh my gosh, what is she doing now?'"

But of course, many audience members still have trouble reconciling Lansbury's Arcati to Lansbury's famous television role, Jessica Fletcher in Murder She Wrote, which ran 1984-96.

"People say to me, 'Well, how can you play Jessica Fletcher and then you come along and play Madame Arcati?'" Lansbury said. "I say, 'It's all about imagination.' That's what acting is, is imagination. If you don't have imagination, you're not going to want to play different roles. I've always wanted to attack roles that didn't appear to be something I'd ever done before."

Though the two characters may share limited similarities, Lansbury says that she personally is "nowhere near" either, "even though a lot of people would say, 'Well, you must be like Jessica.' I'm probably closer to Jessica than I am to Arcati, because I'm a very ordinary person."

Read the original article on the matter here.