who was first choice to play jessica fletcher
Murder, She Wrote Series producers Peter S. Fischer, Richard Levinson and William Link thought Lansbury would be perfect for the part of Jessica Fletcher but did not think that she would be interested in a television series. Earlier, she had acted in two film adaptations of Agatha Christie's mystery novels: as Salome Otterbourne in Death on the Nile and as the famous sleuth Miss Marple in The Mirror Crack'd (1980). When the latter film did poorly—despite an all star cast including Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, Kim Novak, and Tony Curtis—the offer for Lansbury to reprise Miss Marple in three more films never materialized.[10]