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Acting legend Maggie Smith, star of stage, film and 'Downton Abbey,' dead at 89

Acting legend Maggie Smith, star of stage, film and 'Downton Abbey,' dead at 89
Always at heart, an actor with *** supreme comic instinct. As one stage director put it those witty witty elbows. According to Richard Burton, she didn't just steal *** scene. She committed grand larceny. I'm in dire in need of assistance. I'm *** sick woman dying. Possibly. I'm just looking for *** last resting place somewhere to lay my head. I don't know. Do you know of anyone? But there are parts for older actors. There are even parts of *** very, very old address. Thank you evening standard. I'd like to say straight off, there wasn't *** blade of prosthetics. This *** good half century earlier was one of Maggie Smith's first film roles. Flame headed and playing French and *** bit of Cockney. Why do you arrive with champagne? Oh, we can't go bankrupt and he's still and feminine. Well, at least our collection is insured for 20,000 pounds. Blimey. Oh, yeah. Can't we have *** lovely little bonfire and Collect. She was *** leading company player when Laurence Olivier founded Britain's National Theater in 1963. I think you're *** very interesting woman and extremely nice looking. Oh, do you, would you like me to make love to you. Oh, not really David. I wish you wouldn't say things like that. And she was testimonial to Olivier's othello. Good. My Lord. If I have any grace or power to move you his present reconciliation, take for if he be not one that truly loves you, that earth in ignorance and not in cunning. I have no judgment in an honest face. Among multiple awards. She won two Oscars best actress for Miss Jean Brodie, impassioned Edinburgh teacher in the 1930 s, *** vivid splash of color in *** gray school little girls. I am in the business of putting old heads on young shoulders and all my pupils are the creme de la creme, Miss Moody. I am *** teacher. I am *** teacher first, last always and best supporting actress playing an Oscar nominated actress in Neil Simon's California Suite. I hope you win the Oscar. It's bizarre. Eight years with the National Theatre. Two Pinter plays Nine Shakespeare three. Sure. And I finally get nominated for *** nauseating little comedy. That's why they call it Hollywood. I didn't run down to him for 30 years to see it go Lock Stock and barrel to *** stranger from God knows where the contemporary audience says she was the imperious matriarch lady Grantham in tv's Downton Abbey for five years. What should we call each other? Or we could always start with Mrs Crawley and Lady Grantham and of course she was Professor Minerva mcgonagall headmistress of Hogwarts in Harry Potter appearing in six of the seven films. She obviously had *** lot of fun with that. How go is protect us, do your duty to our school. The Scottish accent came naturally. Her mother was Glaswegian. I've always wanted to use that spell in the lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, one of her best and least seen film roles. She became the essence of spinster haunting in her longing and loneliness. Maggie Smith put it simply acting is what I do. And she did it for as long as she was able, she could stop your heart. Said one critic when you least expected it. In 2013, the curtain went up for the gala marking 50 years of the national theater and there she was an original player alone on stage. The warmth of the reception told you all you needed to know about how much Maggie Smith was treasured.
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Acting legend Maggie Smith, star of stage, film and 'Downton Abbey,' dead at 89
Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.Smith's sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a 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 summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”"Jean Brodie," in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the BAFTA as well 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 Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”Her work in 2012 netted three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful “Downton Abbey” TV series and the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet.”Video above: Remembering those we've lost in 2024Her role as Violet Crawley on "Downton," garnered her three Emmy Awards.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” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the 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,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds 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.”“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “The moment you say something is funny it’s gossamer. It’s gone, really.”Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. ... If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.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.Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett, who also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.”However extravagant she may have been on stage or before the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.Simon Callow, who acted with her in “A Room with a View,” said he ruined their first meeting by spouting compliments.“I blurted out various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew. She doesn’t like that sort of thing very much at all,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.”Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, in 1990.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.

Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. She was 89.

Smith's sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

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“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a 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 summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

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

"Jean Brodie," in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the BAFTA as well 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 Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

Her work in 2012 netted three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful “Downton Abbey” TV series and the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet.”

Video above: Remembering those we've lost in 2024

Her role as Violet Crawley on "Downton," garnered her three Emmy Awards.

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” with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, the 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,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds 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.”

“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “The moment you say something is funny it’s gossamer. It’s gone, really.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on Dec. 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, round the universities there. ... If you were kind of clever enough and I suppose quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

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.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for becoming bored. As the actor Jeremy Brett put it, “she starts divinely and then goes off, rather like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only just had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and just so into it,” said Bennett, who also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.”

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

Simon Callow, who acted with her in “A Room with a View,” said he ruined their first meeting by spouting compliments.

“I blurted out various kinds of rubbish about her and she kind of withdrew. She doesn’t like that sort of thing very much at all,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.”

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

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.