Angela Lansbury’s Stepson Reveals the Actress ‘Always Put Family First’ and Is a ‘Great Lady’

Even though Murder, She Wrote actress Angela Lansbury has two kids of her own with second husband Peter Shaw, she still treated her husband’s kid from a previous marriage like he was her very own.

“She’s a great lady,” Angela’s stepson, David Shaw, exclusively told Closer Weekly in the magazine’s latest issue, on newsstands now. “I came in and she didn’t have to have me. It was an incredible thing to do. She always put family first.”

Angela would do anything for David and her kids — Anthony, 67, and Deidre, 66 — but when she had to choose between them and her career, she would sometimes put them second. “As soon as I had the babies I went on a diet and I was back in business,” she once recalled, but admitted that it was one of the worst decisions that she could ever make. “I regret that. You have to be with your children,” she said.

After making that mistake, Angela never put her career over her children again. She even went as far as to uproot her family from Malibu and move them to rural Ireland because her daughter and her son were beginning to develop a drug problem.

“It started with cannabis but moved on to heroin,” Angela has recalled. “I said to Peter, ‘We have to leave.’ So we upped sticks and moved the family to a house I found in County Cork … I refused all work for a year and simply kept house.”

Thanks to Peter and Angela’s big move, their kids got clean and went on to have a very productive life. In 1977, Anthony acted in The Spy Who Loved Me and made the Beauty and the Beast star extremely proud.

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