Dame Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who gained an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and gained new followers within the twenty first century because the dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey and Professor Minerva McGonagall within the Harry Potter movies, died Friday.
Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, mentioned in an announcement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.
“She leaves two sons and 5 loving grandchildren who’re devastated by the lack of their extraordinary mom and grandmother,” they mentioned in an announcement issued by publicist Clair Dobbs.
Smith was steadily rated the preeminent British feminine performer of a era that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf stuffed with performing trophies.
She remained in demand even in her later years, regardless of her lament that “while you get into the granny period, you are fortunate to get something”.
Smith drily summarised her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques”, together with Professor McGonagall. Requested why she took the function, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a tv manufacturing of All of the sudden Final Summer time, mentioned she was “intellectually the neatest actress I’ve ever labored with. You must rise up very, very early within the morning to outwit Maggie Smith”.
Jean Brodie, through which she performed a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, introduced her the Academy Award for greatest actress, and the British Academy Movie Award (BAFTA) as effectively in 1969.
Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for California Suite in 1978, Golden Globes for California Suite and Room with a View, and BAFTAs for lead actress in A Personal Operate in 1984, A Room with a View in 1986, and The Lonely Ardour of Judith Hearne in 1988.
She additionally obtained Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in Othello, Travels with My Aunt, Room with a View and Gosford Park, and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in Tea with Mussolini. On stage, she gained a Tony in 1990 for Lettice and Lovage.
From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in hit TV interval drama Downton Abbey, a task that gained her legions of followers, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a number of different awards nominations.
However she chafed at tv fame. When the present’s run resulted in 2016, Smith mentioned she was relieved.
“It is freedom,” she advised The Related Press.
“Not till ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped on the street and requested for a kind of horrible images,” she mentioned.
She continued performing effectively into her 80s, in movies together with the big-screen spinoff to Downton Abbey in 2019, its 2022 sequel Downton Abbey: A New Period and 2023 launch The Miracle Membership.
Smith had a repute for being troublesome, and generally upstaging others.
Richard Burton remarked that Smith did not simply take over a scene in The VIPs with him: “She commits grand larceny”. Nonetheless, the director Peter Corridor discovered that Smith wasn’t “remotely troublesome until she’s amongst idiots. She’s very onerous on herself, and I do not assume she sees any cause why she should not be onerous on different individuals, too”.
Smith conceded that she might be impatient at occasions.
“It is true I do not tolerate fools, however then they do not tolerate me, so I’m spiky,” Smith mentioned. “Possibly that is why I am fairly good at taking part in spiky aged girls”.
Critic Frank Wealthy, in a New York Occasions evaluate of Lettice and Lovage, praised Smith as “the stylised classicist who can italicise a line as prosaic as ‘Have you ever no marmalade?’ till it feels like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde”.
Smith famously drew laughs from a prosaic line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s Hay Fever.
She repeated the reward for one-liners in Downton Abbey, when the tradition-bound Violet witheringly requested, “What’s a weekend?”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the japanese fringe of London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to high school, one wished to behave, one began to behave, one’s nonetheless performing.”
Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime responsibility in Oxford, the place her theatre research on the Oxford Playhouse Faculty led to a busy apprenticeship.
“I did so many issues, you understand, spherical the schools there. … For those who had been type of intelligent sufficient and I suppose fast sufficient, you may virtually do weekly rep as a result of all the universities had been doing totally different productions at totally different occasions,” she mentioned in a BBC interview.
She took Maggie as her stage identify as a result of one other Margaret Smith was energetic within the theatre.
Laurence Olivier noticed her expertise, invited her to be a part of his unique Nationwide Theatre firm and solid her as his co-star in a 1965 movie adaptation of Othello.
Smith mentioned two administrators, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, each in Nationwide Theatre productions, had been essential influences.
Alan Bennett, making ready to movie the monologue A Mattress Among the many Lentils, mentioned he was cautious of Smith’s repute for turning into bored. Because the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she begins divinely after which goes off, slightly like a cheese”.
“So the truth that we solely simply had sufficient time to do it was an absolute blessing often because she was so contemporary and simply so into it,” mentioned Bennett, who additionally wrote a starring function for Smith in The Woman within the Van.
Nonetheless extravagant she could have been on stage or earlier than the cameras, Smith was identified to be intensely personal.
Simon Callow, who acted together with her in A Room with a View, mentioned he ruined their first assembly by spouting compliments.
“I blurted out numerous sorts of garbage about her and she or he type of withdrew. She does not like that type of factor very a lot in any respect,” Callow mentioned in a movie portrait of the actress.
“She by no means wished to speak about performing. Appearing was one thing she was terrified to speak about as a result of if she did, it will disappear.”
Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equal of a knight, in 1990.
She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. That they had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. The identical 12 months she married the author Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.
