It’s good to discover, in reading the tributes to Angela Lansbury — who died on Tuesday at age ninety-six — that the beloved actor reportedly considered herself “a proud socialist.”

She was a comrade via her illustrious lineage: her father was Edgar Lansbury, the British socialist politician, and her grandfather was George Lansbury, the pacifist, socialist, and leader of the British Labour Party from 1932 to 1935. Her mother was Irish actor Moyna Macgill, and they were fleeing the Nazi bombings of England during the London Blitz when they arrived in New York City in 1940 seeking access to the entertainment industry. They gradually wound their way to Hollywood in 1942, where teenage Angela Lansbury’s astonishing career really began.

Lansbury was the rare actor who achieved so much multifaceted success over so many decades in such a variety of media — film, theater, television — that several generations of audiences who loved her could be thinking of her quite differently.