LONDON (AP)– Maggie Smith, the skillful, scene-stealing star who won an Oscar for the 1969 movie “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and got brand-new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in” Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies, passed away Friday. She was 89.
Smith’s kids, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, stated in a declaration that Smith passed away early Friday in a London healthcare facility.
“She leaves 2 children and 5 caring grandchildren who are ravaged by the loss of their remarkable mom and granny,” they stated in a declaration released through press agent Clair Dobbs.
Smith was regularly ranked the preeminent British female entertainer of a generation that consisted of Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with 2 Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award elections and a rack filled with acting prizes.
She made her movie launching in the 1950s, won Oscars for operate in the 60s and 70s and had remarkable functions in each subsequent years, consisting of an older Wendy in Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a mom exceptional of a convent in Whoopi Goldberg’s funny “Sister Act” (1992 ).
A commanding phase star, she played Shakespearean catastrophe– 1965 adjustment “Othello”– and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & & Juliet” (2011 ).
She stayed in need even in her later years, in spite of her lament that “when you enter the granny period, you’re fortunate to get anything.”
Smith drily summarized her later functions as “a gallery of grotesques,” consisting of Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the function, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a tv production of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” stated she was “intellectually the most intelligent starlet I’ve ever dealt with. You need to get up extremely, extremely early in the early morning to outsmart Maggie Smith.”
“Jean Brodie,” in which she played an alarmingly charming Edinburgh teacher, brought her the Academy Award for finest starlet, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).
Smith included a supporting starlet Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for lead starlet in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.
She likewise got Academy Award elections as a supporting starlet in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting starlet in “Tea with Mussolini.” On phase, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”
From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in struck television duration drama” Downton Abbey,” a function that won her legions of fans, 3 Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a host of other awards elections.
She chafed at tv popularity. When the program’s run ended in 2016,