Angela Lansbury's Career-Defining Murder She Wrote Role Was Created For A '70s Sitcom Legend

It seems impossible to imagine anyone other than the late Angela Lansbury as Jessica Fletcher, the professional novelist with a penchant for solving murders in the long-running series "Murder, She Wrote." However, before Lansbury was cast, the show's creators had a '70s sitcom legend in mind for the role. In 1988, Peter S. Fischer revealed that when he and co-creators Dick Levinson and Bill Link were trying to get the CBS murder mystery off the ground, they thought long and hard about the perfect person to play Jessica Fletcher.

"It had to be someone with charm, style, wit, warmth, enormous talent, and a familiar face to TV audiences," Fischer revealed in an article he penned for The Christian Science Monitor. "Our first and (for a time) only inspiration was Jean Stapleton, who had enjoyed a successful decade as Edith Bunker on 'All in the Family.'" While Stapleton was initially open to the project on the condition that it didn't interfere with her other work, she was "basically noncommittal," wrote Fischer, and by the time the wheels were in motion she had decided that the role wasn't for her.

At this point, the trio pivoted to stage and film star Angela Lansbury, who'd recently revealed an interest in finding a TV project. "After a short meeting in which Levinson, Link, and I fell madly in love with our new star, CBS committed several million dollars and within a matter of weeks, we were on a sound stage shooting the first scene of 'The Murder of Sherlock Holmes,' the two-hour TV movie that served as the pilot for the series," Fischer wrote. The show would go on to air for 12 seasons between 1984 and 1996, racking up several awards along the way, including a couple of Emmys and multiple Golden Globes.

Angela Lansbury was already a well-known actress before she took on the role of Jessica Fletcher (one of the smartest TV detectives ever created) in "Murder, She Wrote," having scooped several Tony Awards for her work on Broadway and appeared in movies such as "Gaslight," "National Velvet," "The Picture of Dorian Gray," "The Manchurian Candidate," and the Disney musical "Bedknobs and Broomsticks." Fronting a TV show was new ground for her, but she quickly conquered the small screen with "Murder, She Wrote," a huge hit that everyone expected to fail.

"In those days (and even now), conventional wisdom at the three major networks dictated that a gentle show without action, sex, or 'meaningful' topicality, and with a leading lady approaching the age of 60, was doomed to failure before it began," Peter S. Fischer wrote in his The Christian Science Monitor article. "In retrospect, it seems to me that 'Murder, She Wrote' was less a lucky accident than an approach and a concept whose time had come."

So why did Lansbury agree to take a chance on the show? "I did it for the money," she told The Mirror in 2016. "There comes a time in a theatrical life when you say to yourself, 'Well I can't make any money in the theater,' so television was a very specific decision I made. When this came on the horizon I thought, 'That's interesting... I think I can make something of this.'" Her intuition paid off: The role made Lansbury the richest woman in TV, with her pay going from $40,000 to £200,000 an episode over the course of the show's run.