Maggie Smith is a skilled, scene-stealing actress who won an Oscar in 1969 for “The Prime of Jane Brody” and is continuing into the 21st century as Grantham in “Downton Abbey.” Countess Tom and Downton Abbey's Minerva McGonagall are winning new fans. She is 89 years old.
Smith died early Friday in a London hospital, his sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement.
“She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement from publicist Clair Dobbs.
Often cited as one of the leading British female actors of her generation, including Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, Smith has a string of Academy Award nominations under her belt and shelves lined with acting trophies.
Even in her later years, she was still popular with people, although she lamented that “when you enter the age of grandma, you are lucky in everything you get.”
Smith dryly summed up her later roles as a “gallery of weirdos,” which included Professor Mak. When asked why she accepted the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in the TV series “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I've ever worked with. You have to get up very early in the morning to be smart.” Take Maggie Smith.
Her performance as a dangerous and charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher in Jean Brody won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA in 1969.
Smith won a supporting actress Oscar for “The California Suite” in 1978, a Golden Globe for “The California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and in 1984 for “Private Functions” and “A Room with a View.” Room” won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in 1986 for “Judith Hearne's Solitary Passion” and “Judith Hearne's Solitary Passion” in 1988.
She was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for Othello, A Trip with My Auntie, A Room with a View and Gosford Park, and for Tea with Mussolini Won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts Award for Best Supporting Actress. On stage, she won a Tony Award in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”
In 2012, she was nominated for three Golden Globe Awards for the globally successful television series “Downton Abbey” and for the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet.”
Smith had a reputation for being difficult to work with and sometimes even stealing the spotlight from others.
Richard Burton commented that Smith did more than just shoot a scene with him in The Guest: “She committed grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall found Smith “not difficult to live with, except when she A bunch of idiots. She's very strict with herself, and I see no reason why she shouldn't be strict with everyone else.”
Smith admits she can be impatient at times.
“Sure, I can't tolerate fools, but they can't tolerate me either, so I'm snarky,” Smith said. “Maybe that's why I'm so good at playing spiky old ladies.”
In his New York Times review of “Lettice and Living Alone,” critic Frank Rich praised Smith as “a stylized classicist who can write in italics something as prosaic as 'Have you no jam?' Unexciting lines until it sounds like a freshly composed aphorism from Coward or Wilde.
Smith elicited laughs with the prosaic line “This haddock is disgusting” in a 1964 cover of Noel Coward's “Hay Fever”.
“But unfortunately, the critics mentioned it and no one laughed anymore,” she recalls. “When you say something is funny, it becomes airy. It really disappears.”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on 28 December 1934 in Ilford, on the east edge of London. One person is still acting.
In 1939, her father was sent to Oxford on wartime duty and she began a busy apprenticeship studying drama at the Oxford Theater School.
“You know, I did a lot of stuff in college there… If you were smart enough and I guess fast enough, you could pretty much do a rep a week because all the colleges were making different reps at different times. works,” she told the BBC in an interview.
She took the stage name Maggie because another Margaret Smith was active in the theatre.
Laurence Olivier discovered her talent, invited her to join his original National Theater company, and gave her a co-starring role with him in the 1965 film adaptation of Othello.
Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, were important influences on the National Theatre's productions.
Alan Bennett, who was preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Between Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith's reputation for being boring. As actor Jeremy Brett said, “She starts out divine and then disappears, like cheese.”
“So we only had enough time to do it, which was an absolute blessing because she was so fresh and so committed,” said Bennett, who also wrote a screenplay for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.” Starring role.
No matter how extravagant she may be on stage or in front of the camera, Smith is known for being deeply private.
Simone Callow, who starred with her in A Room with a View, said he ruined their first meeting with his gushing compliments.
“I blurted out all kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of recoiled. She didn't like that kind of thing at all,” Kahlo said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was afraid to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.”
In 1990, Smith was awarded the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire, equivalent to a knight.
She married actor Robert Stephens in 1967. Married to Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.