Lansbury played her first American character as "Em", a tough honky-tonk saloon singer who slaps Judy Garland's character in the Oscar-winning Wild West musical "The Harvey Girls" (1946). She appeared in "The Hoodlum Saint" (also 1946), "Till the Clouds Roll By" (1947), "If Winter Comes" (1947), "Tenth Avenue Angel" (1948), "The Three Musketeers" (1948), "State of the Union" (1948) and "The Red Danube" (1949). She was loaned by MGM first to United Artists for "The Private Affairs of Bel Ami" (1947), and then to Paramount for "Samson and Delilah" (1949). She appeared as a villainous maidservant in "Kind Lady" (1951) and a French adventuress in "Mutiny" (1952). Turning to radio, in 1948 she appeared in an audio adaptation of Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" for "NBC University Theatre" and the following year she starred in their adaptation of Jane Austen's "Pride and Prejudice". Moving into television, she appeared in a 1950 episode of "Robert Montgomery Presents" adapted from A.J. Cronin's "The Citadel".