Composer and Lyricist Stephen Sondheim

She's spent more than 50 years in the business on stage, and in film and television. When she was 17, she debuted in Gaslight and was nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Ingrid Bergman's Cockney maid. Lansbury also played opposite Judy Garland in The Harvey Girls, was Elvis Presley's mother in Blue Hawaii, and played the manipulative mother in The Manchurian Candidate. On stage she starred in Mame and was the baker of the worst pies in London in Sweeney Todd. For 12 years she starred in the TV series Murder, She Wrote. (Rebroadcast from Nov. 28, 2000.)

Murphy played the lead in Stephen Sondheim's musical Passion. Of the role, which has her playing an ugly, hysterical woman obsessively pursuing a handsome army captain, Murphy says, "I love transformation of any kind... I want to look in the mirror and not see Donna looking back at me." In 1986, Murphy was a woman in drag in The Mystery of Edwin Drood. In 1991, she was introduced as "a girl who will steal your heart and then forget where she put it," playing the amnesiac songstress in Song of Singapore. (Rebroadcast from July 11, 1994.)

Stephen Sondheim about singers