British actress Dame Maggie Smith, known for her prolific career in roles like Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” series and Violet Crawley in “Downton Abbey,” has died, her family confirmed to CBS News. She was 89.
Smith passed away peacefully in the hospital early Friday morning, her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement via publicist Clair Dobbs.
“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,” the statement said.
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Margaret Natalie Smith, who was frequently rated the preeminent British actress of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, was born in Ilford, Essex on Dec. 28, 1934. When she was 4 years old, her family moved to Oxford, where Smith began studying acting at the Oxford Playhouse at the age of 16.
According to the Associated Press, she summed up her life briefly: “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 theater.
In 1952, at 17 years old, Smith launched her illustrious career as Viola in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.” She made her Broadway debut in 1956 playing several roles in the review “New Faces of 1956.”
While Smith made her first film appearance in 1956, she didn’t receive her first screen credit until 1959’s “Nowhere to Go,” which earned her first of 18 British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) nominations.
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.”
“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress and the BAFTA award as well in 1969. She added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978.
Throughout her distinguished career, she was nominated for four more Academy Awards, won four more BAFTAs, five Screen Actors Guild Awards, three Golden Globes and a Tony Award for her work. She was just a Grammy away from EGOT status.
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“And I think that’s never gonna happen!” she told CBS “Sunday Morning” in 2015.
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 gained a new audience when she accepted the role of Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movie series. She once quipped that “Harry Potter is my pension.”
“A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice. It was a whole different lot of people,” she said on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2015. “One kid once said to me, he said, ‘were you really a cat?’ And I heard myself say ‘just pull yourself together! How could I have been?'”
She continued acting well into her 80s, in films such as the 2022 big-screen spinoff “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”
When former “60 Minutes” correspondent Steve Kroft asked Smith in 2013 — at the height of “Downton Abbey” fame — if she’d ever retire, the actress had this to say: “I think that the date for that has gone by. I fear that I won’t work in the theater again. I’m sad about that. But I won’t retire. I think I’ll keep going with Violet and whatever other old biddy comes along,” she said.
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. That same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.
contributed to this report.