Dame Maggie Smith, an actress best known for her roles in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter movies, passed away at the age of 89, according to her family.
Throughout her career, the legendary British actress and singer-songwriter won two Oscars: one for California Suite in 1979 and one for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970.
She was nominated four more times and won eight Bafta prizes.
Dame Maggie “was beloved by so many for her great talent, becoming a true national treasure whose work will be cherished for generations to come,” Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, leading the tributes.
Dame Maggie portrayed the sharp-tongued Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. She was well-known for her pointed witch’s hat and strict demeanor toward the young wizards at Hogwarts.
Career
Over the course of her eight decades-long career, Dame Maggie received early recognition when she was nominated for her first Bafta in 1958 for Nowhere to Go.
Laurence Olivier offered her the role of Desdemona in Othello at the National Theatre in 1963. Two years later, the play was adapted for the big screen, and Smith received her first Oscar nomination.
Among the actress’s other noteworthy performances was the 1985 Merchant Ivory film A Room With a View, in which she accompanied Helen Bonham Carter’s Lucy Honeychurch to Italy as chaperone Charlotte Barlett.
She received a Bafta and another Oscar nomination for the part.
She also starred in the film Tea with Mussolini as an English woman living in 1930s Italy, alongside another national treasure, Dame Judi Dench.
In the two Sister Act movies starring Whoopi Goldberg as nightclub singer Doloris Wilson, who flees the mob in San Francisco by dressing as a nun at a nearby convent, Dame Maggie also portrayed the strict but forgiving Reverend Mother.
In 2015, the writer Alan Bennett’s novel The Lady in the Van was adapted into a film in which she played the elderly woman who lived in a van outside of his home for fifteen years.
Her last parts were in the 2023 film The Miracle Club, costarring Kathy Bates and Laura Linney, about a group of Irish women who travel to the French town of Lourdes on a pilgrimage.
Read Also: “Home Alone” Movie House Being Auctioned For $5.25m
