LONDON — Maggie Smith, the brilliant, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and garnered new fans in the twenty-first century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died on Friday. She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, confirmed in a statement that he died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” the family said in a statement released through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was widely regarded as the best British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a slew of Academy Award nominations, and a shelf full of acting accolades.

Maggie Smith, Scene-Stealing Actor Famed For Harry Potter And ‘Downton Abbey,’ Dies At 89

She made her cinematic debut in the 1950s, received Oscars for her work in the 1960s and 1970s, and had memorable roles in each decade thereafter, including an older Wendy in Peter Pan’s story “Hook” (1991) and a mother superior of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy “Sister Act” (1992).

She is a dominating stage actor who has played Shakespearean tragedy in the 1965 adaptation “Othello” and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).

Even in her latter years, she remained in demand, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith drily summarised her latter roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” which included Professor McGonagall. When asked why she accepted the part, she joked: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in the television adaptation of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” described her as “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with.” You must get up very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, won both the Academy Award for Best Actress and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).

Smith won an Oscar for supporting actress in “California Suite” in 1978, a Golden Globe for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and a BAFTA for lead actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also garnered Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View,” and “Gosford Park,” as well as a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she earned a Tony Award in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

From 2010, she played the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the hit television historical drama “Downton Abbey,” a role that earned her legions of admirers, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, and a slew of other award nominations.

However, she disliked televised fame. When the show’s run concluded in 2016, Smith expressed relief. “It’s freedom,” she told the Associated Press.

“Not until ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs,” stated the actress.

She continued to act long into her 80s, appearing in films such as the 2019 big-screen spinoff of “Downton Abbey,” its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era,” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being challenging and occasionally outperforming others.

Richard Burton stated that Smith did not simply take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall discovered that Smith isn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots.” She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she understands why she shouldn’t be hard on others as well.

Smith admitted that she can be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith joked. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

In his New York Times review of ‘Lettice and Lovage’, critic Frank Rich commended Smith as ‘the stylised classicist who can italicise a passage as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ till it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde’.

In a 1964 performance of Noel Coward’s ‘Hay Fever’, Smith famously got chuckles with the simple line, ‘This haddock is awful’.

In “Downton Abbey,” she used her flair for one-liners again when the tradition-bound Violet enquired, “What is a weekend?”

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

“As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage,” in a statement.

On Friday, fellow actresses paid tribute to her. Hugh Bonneville, who played Smith’s character’s son on “Downton Abbey,” stated, “Anyone who has ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit, and formidable talent.”

“She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances,” according to his statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” described the encounter as “unforgettable… sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion.”

“She could eat anyone alive, and she frequently did. But it’s amusing and terrific company. And tolerated no idiots. We’ll never see another. “Godspeed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote about X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Smith was “a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, east of London. She succinctly summarised her life: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started acting, and one’s still acting.”

In 1939, her father was assigned to military service in Oxford, and her theatre education at the Oxford Playhouse School resulted in a busy apprenticeship.

“I did a lot of things around the universities. “If you were clever and quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she told the BBC.

She chose Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was involved in the theatre.

Maggie Smith, Scene-Stealing Actor Famed For Harry Potter And ‘Downton Abbey,’ Dies At 89

Laurence Olivier recognized her brilliance, offered her to join his initial National Theatre company, and placed her as a co-star in the 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith cited two directors as key influences: Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both of whom worked on National Theatre productions.

Alan Bennett, who was preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” expressed concern about Smith’s reputation for boredom. According to actor Jeremy Brett, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” Bennett told me. He also wrote a leading character for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” in which she played Miss Shepherd, a resilient woman who lived in her car on Bennett’s London driveway for years.

Smith was known for her profound privacy, no matter how extravagant she was on stage or in front of the cameras.

“She never wanted to discuss acting. Simon Callow, who appeared alongside her in “A Room with a View,” said she was afraid to talk about acting because if she did, it would vanish.

Smith married her fellow actor, Robert Stephens, in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, who both became actors and divorced in 1975. The following year, she married Beverley Cross, a writer who died in 1998.

SOURCE | AP