LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who gained an Oscar for the 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, stated in an announcement 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 stated in an announcement issued by means of publicist Clair Dobbs.
Smith was steadily rated the preeminent British feminine performer of a technology that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf filled with performing trophies.
She made her movie debut within the Fifties, gained Oscars for work within the 60s and 70s and had memorable roles in every subsequent decade, together with an older Wendy in Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a mom superior of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s comedy “Sister Act” (1992).
A commanding stage actor, she performed Shakespearean tragedy — 1965 adaptation “Othello” — and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).
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,” stated 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,” during which she performed a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, introduced her the Academy Award for greatest actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as effectively.
Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A 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 obtained Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A 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.
But she chafed at tv fame. When the present’s run led to 2016, Smith stated she was relieved. “It’s freedom,” she advised The Associated Press.
“Not till ‘Downton Abbey’ was I well-known or stopped on the street and requested for a kind of horrible pictures,” she stated.
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 Era” and 2023 launch “The Miracle Club.”
Smith had a popularity for being tough, 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 stated. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”
Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times assessment 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.”
She repeated the present for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet witheringly requested, “What is a weekend?”
King Charles III and his spouse Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equal of a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.
“As the curtain comes down on a nationwide treasure, we be part of all these all over the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many nice performances, and her heat and wit that shone by means of each off and on the stage,” they stated in an announcement.
Fellow actors paid tribute to her on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who performed the son of Smith’s character in “Downton Abbey,” stated “anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”
“She was a real legend of her technology and fortunately will stay on in so many magnificent display performances,” he stated in an announcement.
Rob Lowe, who co-starred along with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” stated the expertise was “unforgettable … sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion.”
“She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And suffered no fools. We will never see another. God speed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote on X.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer known as Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come.”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the japanese 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 at 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 stated 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 (*89*) 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 stated two administrators, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, each in National Theatre productions, have been essential influences.
Alan Bennett, getting ready to movie the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” stated he was cautious of Smith’s popularity 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,” stated Bennett. He additionally wrote a starring position for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a redoubtable girl who lived for years in her car on Bennett’s London driveway.
However extravagant she might have been on stage or earlier than the cameras, Smith was identified to be intensely personal.
“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who performed with her in “A Room with a View.”
Smith 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 identical 12 months she married the author Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.
