RIP Professor McGonagall: 'Harry Potter' actor Maggie Smith dies at 89

The actor as Countess of Grantham in Downtown Abbey, as Prof Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise, and with her Oscar trophy

Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and wowed new generation of cinegoers in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey (2010-15) and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise, died yesterday. She was 89.

Her sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital. Besides two sons, she also left behind five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary grandmother, according to the 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 had replied, "Harry Potter is my pension."

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of Suddenly Last Summer (1992), said she was "intellectually the smartest actress I've ever worked with. You have to get up very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith."

Her portrayal of a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)won her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for California Suite (1978), Golden Globes for California Suite and A Room with a View (1986), and BAFTAs for lead actress in A Private Function (1984), A Room with a View, and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1988). On stage, she won the Tony Award for best actress for Lettice and Lovage (1990).

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 (1963) with him. "She commits grand larceny," he had said. However, 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. Maybe that's why I'm quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies," she had said.

Smith was last seen in The Miracle Club (2023), an Irish drama in which she played the role of Lily Fox. Born Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford, on December 28, 1934, she once summed up her life, saying, "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one's still acting."

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.

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

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.

In 1990, Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight.

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