The British-born actress Angela Lansbury, who has died aged 96, turned her back on a Hollywood film career to find acclaim as a star of stage musicals, then gained her longest-lasting fame on television in Murder, She Wrote as Jessica Fletcher, the best-selling author of mystery novels who solves real-life crimes.
The American series was small-screen detective drama at its most formulaic – Jessica arrives in a town, meets friends, family or business associates, someone is found dead, the wrong person is arrested, then she does her own detective work and unmasks the killer.
