Acclaimed British actress Maggie Smith dies at 89

LONDON – British actress Maggie Smith, an award winning Shakespearian actress and double Oscar winner who later appeared in the Harry Potter films, has died at age 89, the BBC reported on Friday.
Smith was one of a select few to win the treble of an Oscar, Emmy and Tony during seven decades on stage and screen, becoming a star known for her sharp intelligence and waspish wit.
But soul-searching about her art was anathema to the British actor, who jealously guarded her privacy and spurned the trappings of stardom.
“I wish I could just go into Harrods and order a personality,” she once said. “It would make life so much easier.”
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Smith “introduced us to new worlds with the countless stories she acted over her long career”.
“She was beloved by so many for her great talent, becoming a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come,” he said.
After starting on stage in the 1950s, Smith became a fixture at Britain’s new National Theatre in the 1960s, working alongside Laurence Olivier, before winning her first Oscar at the end of the decade.
But for many younger fans in the 21st century, she was best-known as Professor McGonagall in all seven Harry Potter movies, and the Dowager Countess in the hit TV series Downton Abbey, a role that seemed tailor-made for an actor known for purse-lipped asides and malicious cracks.
She died in hospital in London early on Friday, her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said.
“An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end,” they said in a statement.
Smith’s first Academy Award nomination was for her turn playing Desdemona opposite Olivier’s Othello in 1965, before winning the Oscar for her role as an Edinburgh schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969.
She won her second Oscar for her supporting role in the 1978 comedy California Suite, a performance that prompted co-star Michael Caine to say: “Maggie didn’t just steal the film, she committed grand larceny.”
Other critically acclaimed roles included Lady Bracknell in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest on the West End stage, a 92-year-old bitterly fighting senility in Edward Albee’s play Three Tall Women, and her part in the 2001 black comedy movie Gosford Park.
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec 28, 1934, in Essex, northeast of London. She moved to Oxford as a small child when her father, a pathologist, took a role at the university, and she began acting in the local theatre at 17.
Her big break came in 1956 with New Faces on Broadway. Her 1958 part in the British crime movie Nowhere to Go earned her a BAFTA nomination.
The following years were to see a welter of acclaimed roles in movies (including Travels with my Aunt, A Room with a View and The Secret Garden), on stage (Lettice and Lovage, Virginia) and on television (David Copperfield, My House in Umbria).
Critic Irving Wardle hailed a mouth that contracted from a wide, inviting smile to the “sucked-in venom of a stoat at bay” — something she put to good use in Downton Abbey.
For many viewers, her waspish turn in the smash-hit historical series that ran on television from 2010 to 2015 was the best reason to watch it, and it earned her multiple awards — although it did little for her desire for a private life.
“I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey. I’m not kidding. I’d go to theatres, I’d go to galleries, things like that, on my own. And now I can’t and that’s awful,” she said at the BFI Radio Times festival in 2017.
Smith was known for being demanding on herself and others. Theatre director Peter Hall, who worked closely with her for many years, said: “She nags herself into perfection.”
She had a tempestuous eight-year marriage to actor Robert Stephens, which ended while they were playing newly entangled divorcees in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. They had two sons — actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin.
Smith then married her teenage sweetheart, writer Beverley Cross, a rock of imperturbability for her until his death in 1998.
In 1990, Smith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and became a Dame.