By JILL LAWLESS
LONDON (AP) — 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. She was 89.
Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, stated 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 stated in a press release issued by means of publicist Clair Dobbs.
Smith was continuously rated the preeminent British feminine performer of a era that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf stuffed with performing trophies.
She remained in demand even in her later years, regardless of her lament that “while 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 “All of the sudden Final Summer season,” stated she was “intellectually the neatest actress I’ve ever labored with. It’s a must to stand up very, very early within the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”
“Jean Brodie,” by 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 Personal Perform” 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 Finest Unique Marigold Resort” and “Quartet.”
Smith had a fame for being troublesome, and generally upstaging others.
Richard Burton remarked that Smith didn’t simply take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” Nonetheless, the director Peter Corridor discovered that Smith wasn’t “remotely troublesome except she’s amongst idiots. She’s very laborious on herself, and I don’t suppose she sees any purpose why she shouldn’t be laborious on different folks, too.”
Smith conceded that she might be impatient at occasions.
“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, however then they don’t tolerate me, so I’m spiky,” Smith stated. “Perhaps that’s why I’m fairly good at enjoying spiky aged girls.”
Critic Frank Wealthy, in a New York Occasions evaluate 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 seems 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 highschool, one needed to behave, one began to behave, one’s nonetheless performing.”
Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime obligation in Oxford, the place her theater research on the Oxford Playhouse Faculty led to a busy apprenticeship.
“I did so many issues, , spherical the schools there. … In case you have been type of intelligent sufficient and I suppose fast sufficient, you may virtually do weekly rep as a result of all the universities have been doing totally different productions at totally different occasions,” she stated in a BBC interview.
She took Maggie as her stage title 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 authentic Nationwide 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 Nationwide Theatre productions, have been necessary influences.
Alan Bennett, making ready to movie the monologue “A Mattress Among the many Lentils,” stated he was cautious of Smith’s fame for turning into bored. Because the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she begins divinely after which goes off, quite 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 recent and simply so into it,” stated Bennett, who additionally wrote a starring function for Smith in “The Girl within the Van.”
Nonetheless extravagant she could have been on stage or earlier than the cameras, Smith was identified to be intensely personal.
Simon Callow, who acted together with her in “A Room with a View,” stated he ruined their first assembly by spouting compliments.
“I blurted out numerous sorts of garbage about her and he or she type of withdrew. She doesn’t like that kind of factor very a lot in any respect,” Callow stated in a movie portrait of the actress. “She by no means needed to speak about performing. 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.
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Related Press author Robert Barr contributed biographical materials to this obituary earlier than his loss of life in 2018.
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