Angela Lansbury to Receive First Academy Award

The Governors Awards are one of the side events of the three-ring circus that is the Oscars, honorary and humanitarian awards carved out of the larger broadcast in 2009 and presented in a separate ceremony. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced this year’s honorees, which include Steve Martin and Angelina Jolie… and Angela Lansbury, for whom this will be her first Oscar.

Lansbury, familiar to many from well, the list is long. Depending on how old you are, you might remember her best as Mrs. Potts (Beauty and the Beast), Jessica Fletcher (Murder, She Wrote), Eglantine Price (Bedknobs and Broomsticks), or even Nancy Oliver in 1944 Gaslight. Despite a seventy plus year career, she’s only ever been nominated for supporting actress Oscars (for Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and The Manchurian Candidate), never winning. Lansbury, Martin, and costume designer Piero Tosi will receive an Academy Honorary Award for the “indelible” contributions they’ve made to cinema.

Jolie, on the other hand, will be awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award, for her efforts with the Prevent Sexual Violence Initiative, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees as the Special Envoy of High Commissioner António Guterres. Congratulations to both ladies, and especially to a long overdue statuette to the lady behind my beloved Eglantine Price, the Nazi-fighting, kid tolerating, Disney witch I grew up wanting to be.

(via Deadline.)