Maggie Smith, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen, dies at 89 | film

Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actress whose works ranged from “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to Harry Potter to “Downton Abbey,” has died at the age of 89.

The news was confirmed by her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement. They said: “She passed away peacefully in hospital this morning, Friday September 27th.

“She was an extremely private person and ended up hanging out with friends and family. She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.

“We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and tireless kindness during her final days.

“We thank you for all of your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”

Smith’s gift for acerbic comedy was arguably the source of her greatest successes: the witty teacher Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, top-notch plays like A Room with a View and Gosford Park, and a string of collaborations on stage and screen with Alan Bennett, including The Lady in the Van. “My career has been checkered,” she told the Guardian in 2004. “I think I’ve been pigeonholed as humor… When you do comedy, you somehow don’t count.” Comedy is never seen as reality.” However, she shined Smith also appeared in non-comedic dramatic roles, appearing alongside Laurence Olivier at the National Theater, winning Best Actress for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler .

Smith was born in 1934, grew up in Oxford and began acting at the local Playhouse theater as a teenager. While she appeared in a number of stage shows, including Bamber Gascoigne’s musical comedy Share My Lettuce (1957) opposite Kenneth Williams, Smith also made progress in film, with her first major success in the Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go (1958), for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Bafta. After appearing in Peter Shaffer’s stage double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith was invited by Olivier in 1962 to join the newly formed National Theater Company, for whom she appeared in a number of productions, including Desdemona in Olivier’s “Othello” in “Notorious.” Blackface production in 1964. (Smith reprized the role in Olivier’s film version the following year, for which both were Oscar-nominated.)

In 1969, she was cast in the lead role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel about the Edinburgh schoolteacher with an admiration for Mussolini; Smith won the 1970 Oscar for Best Actress. Later that year she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theater in London’s West End; Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard described her as “haunting the stage like a giant portrait of Modigliani, her alabaster skin tense with hidden fear.” She received another Oscar nomination for best actress in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation “Traveling with My Aunt.” and an Oscar (for best supporting actress) in 1979 for “California Suite,” the Neil Simon-written anthology play in which she played an Oscar-nominated film star.

Smith continued her successful parallel film and stage careers throughout the 1980s. She starred opposite Michael Palin in A Private Function, the wartime comedy about food rationing written by Alan Bennett, and had a dazzling supporting role as garrulous cousin Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View which she was responsible for being nominated for another Oscar. She followed this with “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne,” a character study in which Smith played the unmarried, frustrated woman of the title. On stage, she played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival Theater in Canada and played tour guide Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage in 1987. She also reunited with Bennett for his Talking Heads series on radio and television, in which she played a vicar’s wife who has an affair.

Film roles continued to come: she played alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s loosely autobiographical “Tea With Mussolini”, a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s country house crime thriller “Gosford Park” and alongside Judi Dench in “Ladies in Lavender”, written and directed by Charles Dance. She also took on the prominent role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, appearing in all installments except “The Deathly Hallows Part 1” between 2001 and 2011. Meanwhile, she landed her most influential TV role as the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. by Gosford Park author Julian Fellowes – he reprises the role in two standalone films released in 2019 and 2022. After playing the role on stage in 1999, Smith enjoyed a late-career triumph in The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett’s memoir about the woman who lived in his driveway.

Smith was married twice: to fellow actor Robert Stephens between 1967 and 1975 and to Beverley Cross between 1975 and his death in 1998.