‘Downton Abbey,’ ‘Harry Potter’ actress Maggie Smith dies

The actress who brought Professor Minerva McGonagall to life has died.

Dame Maggie Smith was 89 years old.

Her family made the announcement, BBC News reported. “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith,” her children Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement.

“She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September. An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”

A cause of death was not shared, but her family thanked the staff at the Chelsea and Westminister Hospital for caring for her “during her final days.”

The family also asked for privacy.

Smith won two Oscars over her decades-long career for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and “California Suite” but may be best known to the current generation as shape-shifting witch and mentor to the fictional Harry Potter Professor McGonagall and as the dowager countess on “Downton” Abbey,” The Washington Post reported.

She also was well known as a theatrical actress, with the Post writing in her obituary, “A comedian of incandescent wit and a tragedian of cunning power, she portrayed both Oscar Wilde’s class-conscious Lady Bracknell and Shakespeare’s ruthlessly ambitious Lady Macbeth with spellbinding precision.”

Playwright Alan Bennett told The New York Times in the past, “The boundary between laughter and tears is … where Maggie is poised always.”

She won a Tony for best leading actress in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage,” a comedy written by Peter Shaffer to “celebrate her extraordinary gifts of glee and glitter.”

The Post said that Smith rarely gave interviews but she took refuge in acting after she was raised by, what the newspaper described as “dour and withholding parents and a crushing first marriage.”

“There are times when I’m not even sure I have a real life,” Smith told Life magazine, the Post reported. “I know it’s only on the stage that I feel really alive. For a certain length of time I have to become a person whom I totally believe in. I would like to be somebody who is really beautiful.”

Smith was born Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford, England, on Dec. 28, 1934, but grew up in Cowley. Her father was a pathologist who worked on penicillin research, and her mother was “unaffectionate and controlling” and the inspiration for her role as Jean Brodie, the Post reported.

Her brothers were architects. She didn’t go to theatre or movies much growing up but took ballet lessons and a drama teacher realized there was something special in Smith.

She enrolled at the Oxford Playhouse School and frequently had comedic roles to distract from what her mother and grandmother told her were her inadequate looks.

Smith adopted the stage name Maggie because there was another Margaret Smith in the theatre, The Associated Press reported.

She was discovered by Leonard Sillman who saw her in a 1955 London review and cast her in “New Faces of 1956,” giving her a big break as showgirl Miss Bowls of Sunshine whose costume was made of oranges and sang “One Perfect Moment.” She returned to England appearing in “The Private Ear,” “The Public Eye” and “Mary, Mary” before being brought into the National Theatre by none other than Laurence Olivier. She was a founding member of the theater company created by Olivier, the Post reported. He also cast her as his co-star in the 1965 film version of “Othello,” the AP reported.

Smith was married to Robert Stephens in 1967, a leading man with National Theatre, and with whom she acted on stage and screen. The marriage produced two sons before the couple divorced in 1975.

She then married playwright Beverly Cross that same year, the AP reported. He died in 1998.

While she was known for her stage and big screen roles and had been awarded Tonys and Oscars, she also earned an Emmy for HBO’s 2003 film “My House in Umbra.” In all, she won 50 awards and had 108 nominations, according to her IMDB profile.

Smith was among the cast of the 1999 BBC miniseries “David Copperfield,” which starred Daniel Radcliffe as Copperfield and Smith as great-aunt Betsey. They were then paired again as Harry Potter and McGonagall in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”

She was honored by the queen as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990, the AP reported.

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