British actor Dame Maggie Smith's big break came in 1956 with New Faces on Broadway. Her 1958 part in the British crime movie Nowhere to Go earned her a BAFTA nomination.Kirsty Wigglesworth/The Associated Press
Dame Maggie Smith, who died on Friday aged 89, was a perfectionist who turned anxiety into an art form and was hailed as one of the great actors of stage and screen.
One of the few actors to win the treble of an Oscar (twice), Emmy (four times) and Tony, Dame Maggie moved effortlessly between performing Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde on stage to the Harry Potter movie franchise and the hit television series Downton Abbey.
But soul-searching about her art was anathema to the British actor, who jealously guarded her privacy and spurned the trappings of stardom.
”I wish I could just go into Harrods and order a personality,” she once said. “It would make life so much easier.”
Perhaps her concern about her perceived lack of personality was what spurred her to take on so many others.
Alan Rickman as Professor Severus Snape, Emma Watson as Hermione Granger, Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter and Maggie Smith as Professor Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.Jaap Buitendijk
Her first Academy Award nomination was for her turn playing Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s Othello in 1965, before she won her first Oscar for her role as an Edinburgh schoolmistress in 1969′s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
Her second was for her supporting role in the 1978 comedy California Suite, where she played alongside Michael Caine.
Other critically acclaimed roles included Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest on the West End stage, a 92-year-old bitterly fighting senility in Edward Albee’s play Three Tall Women, and her part in the 2001 black comedy movie Gosford Park.
Maggie Smith (centre) stars as Constance, The Countess of Trentham, in Gosford Park.
In the 21st century, she was best known as Professor McGonagall in all seven Harry Potter movies, and the Dowager Countess in the hit TV series and movie spinoffs of Downton Abbey, a role that seemed tailor-made for an actress known for purse-lipped asides and malicious cracks.
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Essex, northeast of London. She moved to Oxford as a small child when her father, a pathologist, took a role at the university, and she began acting in the local theatre at 17.
Her big break came in 1956 with New Faces on Broadway. Her 1958 part in the British crime movie Nowhere to Go earned her a BAFTA nomination.
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The following years were to see a welter of acclaimed roles in movies (including Travels with My Aunt, A Room with a View and The Secret Garden), on stage (Lettice and Lovage, Virginia) and on television (David Copperfield, My House in Umbria).
Critic Irving Wardle hailed a mouth that contracted from a wide, inviting smile to the “sucked-in venom of a stoat at bay” – something she put to good use in Downton Abbey.
For many viewers, her waspish turn in the smash-hit historical series that ran on television from 2010 to 2015 was the best reason to watch it, and it earned her multiple awards – although it did little for her desire for a private life.
Actress Maggie Smith, in character as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, on the set of Downton Abbey outside Highclere Castle in England on June 4, 2015.NICK BRIGGS/The New York Times News Service
“I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey. I’m not kidding. I’d go to theatres, I’d go to galleries, things like that, on my own. And now I can’t and that’s awful,” she said at the BFI Radio Times festival in 2017.
Dame Maggie was known for being demanding on herself and others. Theatre director Peter Hall, who worked closely with her for many years, said: “She nags herself into perfection.”
She had a tempestuous eight-year marriage to actor Robert Stephens, which ended while they were playing newly entangled divorcees in Noel Coward’s Private Lives. They had two sons – actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin.
Dame Maggie then married her teenage sweetheart, writer Beverley Cross, a rock of imperturbability for her until his death in 1998.
Queen Elizabeth II, second left, appears with actors Charles Dance, left, Maggie Smith, second right, and Judi Dench at the Royal performance of Ladies in Lavender which was directed by Charles Dance and screened at a cinema in London's Leicester Square.Richard Lewis/The Associated Press
In 1990, Dame Maggie was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and became a Dame.
Britain's Dame Maggie Smith, a double Oscar winner hailed as one of the great actors of stage and screen, who moved effortlessly between Shakespearian plays and the Harry Potter movie franchise, has died aged 89, her family said on Friday.
Reuters