CNN
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Dame Maggie Smith, one among Britain’s best-known actresses whose lengthy profession ranged from starring reverse Laurence Olivier in “Othello” on stage and display, to roles in “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey,” has died, her sons introduced in an announcement shared by their publicist Clair Dobbs.
She was 89.
“It’s with nice unhappiness we’ve to announce the dying of Dame Maggie Smith. She handed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday twenty seventh September. An intensely personal particular person, she was with family and friends on the finish,” the assertion reads. “She leaves two sons and 5 loving grandchildren who’re devastated by the lack of their extraordinary mom and grandmother. We wish to take this chance to thank the fantastic workers on the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for his or her care and unstinting kindness throughout her last days.”
Smith was born in 1934 in Ilford, then a middle-class east London suburb. Shortly earlier than the beginning of World Battle II the household moved to Oxford, the place her father labored as a pathologist at Oxford College.
On graduating from highschool, Smith attended the Oxford Playhouse College from 1951 to 1953, making her stage debut in an Oxford College Dramatic Society manufacturing of William Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Evening.”
She went on to seem on Broadway in “New Faces of 1956,” after which held the lead comic function within the London revue “Share My Lettuce,” between 1957 and 1958. She quickly started showing usually in performs at The Previous Vic theater in London.
In 1964, she performed Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello, earlier than reprising the function for the movie model the next yr. Smith gained her first Academy Award for finest actress in 1969 for her portrayal of an unconventional schoolteacher within the film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.”
In 1978, she was awarded a second Academy Award, this time for finest supporting actress, for her efficiency in Neil Simon’s “California Suite.” She has additionally acquired British Academy Movie Awards for her work, together with for her roles in 1985’s “A Room with a View” and 1987’s “The Lonely Ardour of Judith Hearne.”
Smith was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990, and from then on was extensively often known as Dame Maggie Smith.
However in some ways, her finest roles have been but to return, together with a starring function within the 1999 traditional “Tea with Mussolini,” a couple of group of upper-middle class English ladies in Florence, Italy, through the time of fascism, directed by Franco Zeffirelli.
Maybe she will likely be finest remembered as an actress who managed to realize not solely longevity however even higher fame in later life.
She got here to the discover of youthful viewers because the strict however truthful witchcraft instructor Minerva McGonagall in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001), additionally showing in a number of “Harry Potter” sequels.
Acclaim got here once more on each side of the Atlantic for her interpretation of the caustic-tongued Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” the acclaimed interval drama in regards to the British aristocracy. She acquired three Emmy Awards for the function, which she reprised for a 2019 feature-length movie.
In her later years, Smith turned a job mannequin for ageing gracefully, a course of she dealt with together with her customary allure and wit.
When requested in 2017 by the UK journal “Girls’s World” why she had not gone to extra award ceremonies, Smith replied: “I really suppose if I went to Los Angeles, for instance, I believe I’d frighten folks… They don’t see older folks.”
Smith was married twice, to the actor Robert Stephens – the couple divorced in 1974 – and once more to playwright Beverley Cross, from 1975 till his dying in 1998.