Cabot Cove, Maine was actually in California but, as Hollywood producers might say, what’s a few thousand miles among friends?
Broadway is marking what would have been Angela Lansbury’s 100th birthday with a special edition of Playbill magazine.
Lansbury, the famous actress who’d appeared on Broadway, owed her real fame to “Murder, She Wrote,” a TV drama based in Cabot Cove.
In reality, Cabot Cove was a fictional Maine town but plenty of tourists certainly came to Maine looking for directions to it.
But as we sarcastically tell lost tourists in Maine, “you can’t get there from here.”
That’s because even the fictional Cabot Cove was not located in Maine – the TV show was filmed in California.
Lansbury a “dame” and six-time Tony Award winner, died October 11, 2022, just days before her 97th birthday. October 16 would have been her 100th birthday.
In “Murder, She Wrote,” Lansbury played the role of Jessica Fletcher, a mystery writer and amateur detective who lived in Cabot Cove.
To create the New England feel of Cabot Cove, the show filmed in California but nonetheless sought to capture the look of a charming, small-town Maine setting.
“Murder, She Wrote” was mostly filmed on sound stages at Universal Studios in Universal City, near Los Angeles.
The series also filmed exterior shots and some episodes on location in the northern California town of Mendocino, which stood in for the fictional town Cabot Cove.
Cabot Cove dockside scenes were filmed a few miles north of Mendocino, at Noyo Harbor in Fort Bragg, California.
Leave it to Hollywood – which filmed in California only because doing the show out of Maine would have been too expensive.
So of course they had to find a place in California that they thought looked like Maine.
Cabot Cove became one of the most famous fictional towns in the world.
“Murder, She Wrote” which ran for 12 seasons, until 1996, was, at the time, the most popular scripted series on CBS and one of the most-watched shows internationally.
Lansbury was a British-American-Irish actress who enjoyed a stunningly long career spanning 80 years playing various roles in film, stage and television.
Her “Murder, She Wrote” fame resulted in her being hired to appear in advertisements and infomercials for Bufferin, MasterCard and the Beatrix Potter Company.
Lansbury owed a huge debt to a fake town along the coast of Maine.
Tourists are still looking for it.
