Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who received an Oscar for 1969 movie “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” 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. She was 89.
Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, mentioned in a press release that Smith 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,” they mentioned in a press release issued by means of 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 appearing trophies.
She remained in demand even in her later years, regardless of her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.”
Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” together with Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the position, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a tv manufacturing of “Suddenly Last Summer,” mentioned she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”
“Jean Brodie,” by which she performed a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, introduced her the Academy Award for greatest actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as properly.
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 Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.
She additionally acquired 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 received 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 job that received her legions of followers, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a number of different awards nominations.
She continued appearing properly into her 80s, in movies such a 2022 big-screen spinoff “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and 2023 launch “The Miracle Club.”
Smith had a repute for being troublesome, and typically upstaging others.
Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t simply take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the director Peter Hall discovered that Smith wasn’t “remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people, too.”
Smith conceded that she might be impatient at instances.
“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith mentioned. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”
Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times evaluate of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds 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.”
“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “The moment you say something is funny it’s gossamer. It’s gone, really.”
She repeated the present for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet acidly requested, “What is a weekend?”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the jap fringe of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”
Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime obligation in Oxford, the place her theater research on the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.
“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. … If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she mentioned in a BBC interview.
She took Maggie as her stage title as a result of one other Margaret Smith was energetic within the theater.
Laurence Olivier noticed her expertise, invited her to be a part of his authentic National Theatre firm and forged her as his co-star in a 1965 movie adaptation of “Othello.”
Smith mentioned two administrators, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, each in National Theatre productions, have been vital influences.
Alan Bennett, getting ready to movie the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” mentioned he was cautious of Smith’s repute for changing into bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “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,” mentioned Bennett. He additionally wrote a starring position for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a redoubtable lady who lived for years in her car on Bennett’s London driveway.
However extravagant she could have been on stage or earlier than the cameras, Smith was identified to be intensely non-public.
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 various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew. She doesn’t like that sort of thing very much at all,” Callow mentioned in a movie portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would 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. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby — who each grew as much as be actors — and divorced in 1975. The similar yr she married the author Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.
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