Distinguished British actress Dame Angela Lansbury, returns to the National Theater for Noël Coward’s comedy “Blithe Spirit,” portraying a psychic recruited by a British novelist (Charles Edwards) to help with his book on the afterlife. Things go horribly awry however, when their seance ends up conjuring the ghost of his first wife (Melissa Woodbridge), who inevitably clashes with his second wife (Charlotte Parry). Lansbury, 89, launched her stage career at the National Theater back in 1957. Her Broadway debut was in the production “Hotel Paradiso,” a French burlesque set in Paris directed by Peter Glenville. She became a TV icon playing mystery writer and amateur detective Jessica Fletcher, in the classic 1980’s series “Murder, She Wrote.” Other notable roles include voicing lovable Mrs. Potts in Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” (1991) and a Senator’s wife who brainwashed a political assassin with a game of solitaire in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962).
