Maggie Smith, star of “Downtown Abbey” and “Harry Potter”, passes away at 89

Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who received 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 (September 27, 2024). 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 5 loving grandchildren who’re devastated by the lack of their extraordinary mom and grandmother,” they mentioned in a press release issued via publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was incessantly rated the preeminent British feminine performer of a technology that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf filled with appearing trophies.

She remained in demand even in her later years, regardless of her lament that “if you get into the granny period, you’re fortunate to get something.”

Smith drily summarized 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 Immediately 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 finest actress, and the British Academy Movie Award (BAFTA) as properly 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 Non-public Operate in 1984, A Room with a View in 1986, and The Lonely Ardour 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.

Her work in 2012 netted three Golden Globe nominations for the globally profitable Downton Abbey TV sequence and the movies The Greatest Unique Marigold Lodge and Quartet.

Smith had a status 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.” Nevertheless, the director Peter Corridor discovered that Smith wasn’t “remotely troublesome until she’s amongst idiots. She’s very exhausting on herself, and I don’t assume she sees any purpose why she shouldn’t be exhausting on different folks, too.”

Smith conceded that she may very well be impatient at instances.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, however then they don’t tolerate me, so I’m spiky,” Smith mentioned. “Perhaps that’s why I’m fairly good at taking part in spiky aged girls.”

Critic Frank Wealthy, in a New York Instances overview of Lettice and Lovage, praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you ever no marmalade?’ till it appears 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.”

“However sadly the critics talked about it, and after that it by no means bought fun,” she recalled. “The second you say one thing is humorous it’s gossamer. It’s gone, actually.”

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 high school, one wished to behave, one began to behave, one’s nonetheless appearing.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime obligation in Oxford, the place her theater research on the Oxford Playhouse College led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many issues, you recognize, spherical the colleges there. … When you had been sort of intelligent sufficient and I suppose fast sufficient, you might nearly do weekly rep as a result of all the universities had been doing totally different productions at totally different instances,” 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 theater.

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 vital influences.

Alan Bennett, getting ready to movie the monologue A Mattress Among the many Lentils, mentioned he was cautious of Smith’s status for changing 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 Girl within the Van.

Nevertheless extravagant she could have been on stage or earlier than the cameras, Smith was recognized 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 varied sorts of garbage about her and he or she sort of withdrew. She doesn’t like that form 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 appearing. Performing was one thing she was terrified to speak about as a result of if she did, it might 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 yr she married the author Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.