Dame Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

British actress Dame Maggie Smith poses in London on Dec. 16, 2015.
British actress Dame Maggie Smith has died, aged 89, her family announced in a statement (Photo: December 2015) (AP Photo/Kirsty Wigglesworth)

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything”.

Smith drily summarised her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques”, including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Dame Maggie Smith and her son Chris Larkin (PA Images via Getty Images)

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of Suddenly Last Summer, said 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, in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well 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 Private Function in 1984, A Room with a View in 1986, and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne in 1988.

She also received 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 won a Tony in 1990 for Lettice and Lovage.

Actress Maggie Smith holds her Oscar
Actress Maggie Smith holds her Oscar for best supporting actress in the film “California Suite” in Los Angeles, April 9, 1979. (AP Photo/Reed Saxon)
Laura Carmichael (Lady Edith Crawley) and Dame Maggie Smith (Violet) filming a scene.
The actress gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey

Her work in 2012 netted three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful Downton Abbey TV series and the films The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and Quartet.

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes upstaging others.

Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t just take over a scene in The VIPs with him: “She commits grand larceny”. However, the director Peter Hall found 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 could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies”.

The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel saw Dame Maggie Smith come together on screen alongside alongside Dame Judi Dench and Bill Nighy. (Fox Searchlight Pictures)

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of Lettice and Lovage, praised Smith as “the stylised 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.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on December 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 duty in Oxford, where her theatre studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

Dame Maggie Smith in 2019.
Dame Maggie Smith, winner of Natasha Richardson Award for Best Actress Award in partnership with Christian Louboutin for ‘A German Life’ poses in the winners room at the 65th Evening Standard Theatre Awards In Association With Michael Kors at London Coliseum on November 24, 2019 in London, England. (Dave Benett/Getty Images)

“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 said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theatre.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theatre company and cast her as his co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of Othello.

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theatre productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue A Bed Among the Lentils, said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming 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,” said Bennett, who also wrote a starring role for Smith in The Lady in the Van.

Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith, who is in rehearsal on new show “Night and Day” appears at Minskoff Rehearsal Studios on Sept. 27, 1979 (AP Photo/Ray Howard)

However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

Simon Callow, who acted with her in A Room with a View, said he ruined their first meeting 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 said in a film 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 equivalent of a knight, in 1990.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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