Actor Tony Todd, known for his roles in the horror film “Candyman” and its 2021 sequel, died on Wednesday, his representative, Jeffrey Goldberg, told CBS News. He was 69.

“Regretfully, I can confirm that my friend and client of over 30 years, Tony Todd, has passed away on Wednesday, November 6, 2024 at 11:50 p.m. peacefully at his home in Marina Del Rey,” said Goldberg. “I am lucky to have been able to work with this amazing man and I will miss him every single day.”

Todd’s cause of death was not disclosed.

For four decades, Todd’s roles spanned genres, with film credits that started in 1986, per IMDB. They range from his role in the Academy Award-winning film “Platoon” to “Final Destination.”

Todd is perhaps best known for playing Daniel Robitaille in the 1992 film “Candyman” and its 2021 sequel. Todd’s character was the ghost of a Black artist and the son of a slave who was killed for his relationship with a White woman. The film also starred Virginia Madsen as a graduate student in Chicago who was preparing a thesis on the legend of Candyman.

Todd reprised his role in 2021 in the sequel, which starred Yahya Abdul-Mateen as an artist who gets drawn into the Candyman legend. 

Madsen wrote a tribute post to Todd on Instagram, saying, “The great actor Tony Todd has left us and now is an angel. As he was in life. More later but I can’t right now. I love you.”

New Line Cinema, which produced the “Final Destination” franchise, also posted on Instagram about Todd’s death.

“The industry has lost a legend. We have lost a cherished friend. Rest in peace, Tony,” read the post.

Todd was born on Dec. 4, 1954, in Washington, D.C. He pursued acting at the Eugene O’Neill National Theatre Institute and Trinity Repertory Conservatory, according to Deadline.

He went on to guest star in popular TV shows and sitcoms from the 1980s and 1990s including “Night Court,” “Matlock” and “Law & Order.”

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Todd is survived by his wife, Fatima, and two children.

Teri Garr, the quirky comedy actor who rose from being a background dancer in Elvis Presley movies to co-star in such favorites as “Young Frankenstein” and “Tootsie,” has died, CBS News confirmed. She was 79.

Garr died Tuesday of multiple sclerosis “surrounded by family and friends,” publicist Heidi Schaeffer said in a statement. Garr battled other health problems in recent years and underwent an operation in January 2007 to repair an aneurysm.

Admirers took to social media Tuesday in her honor, with writer-director Paul Feig calling her “truly one of my comedy heroes. I couldn’t have loved her more” and screenwriter Cinco Paul saying: “Never the star, but always shining. She made everything she was in better.”

Garr, who was sometimes credited as Terri, Terry or Terry Ann during her long career, grew up in Los Angeles with two older brothers in a show business family.

Her mother, Phyllis, was a former dancer. Her dad, Eddie, was a traveling comedian and a gambler, who died when Garr was 11.

Their daughter began dance lessons at 6 and by 14 was dancing with the San Francisco and Los Angeles ballet companies.

She was 16 when she joined the road company of “West Side Story” in Los Angeles, and as early as 1963 she began appearing in bit parts in films. She recalled in a 1988 interview how she won the “West Side Story” role. After being dropped from her first audition, she returned a day later in different clothes and was accepted.

From there, the blonde, statuesque Garr found steady work dancing in movies, and she appeared in the chorus of nine Presley films, including “Viva Las Vegas,” “Roustabout” and “Clambake.”

She also appeared on numerous television shows, including “Star Trek,” “Dr. Kildare” and “Batman,” and was a featured dancer on the rock ‘n’ roll music show “Shindig,” the rock concert performance T.A.M.I. and a cast member of “The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour.”

Her big film break came as Gene Hackman’s girlfriend in 1974’s Francis Ford Coppola thriller “The Conversation.” That led to an interview with Mel Brooks, who said he would hire her for the role of Gene Wilder‘s German lab assistant in 1974’s “Young Frankenstein” — if she could speak with a German accent.

“Cher had this German woman, Renata, making wigs, so I got the accent from her,” Garr once recalled.

The film established her as a talented comedy performer, with New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael proclaiming her “the funniest neurotic dizzy dame on the screen.”

Her big smile and off-center appeal helped land her roles in “Oh God!” opposite George Burns and John Denver, “Mr. Mom” (as Michael Keaton’s wife) and “Tootsie” in which she played the girlfriend who loses Dustin Hoffman to Jessica Lange and learns that he has dressed up as a woman to revive his career. (She also lost the supporting actress Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards to Lange.)

Although best known for comedy, Garr showed in such films as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “The Black Stallion” and “The Escape Artist” that she could handle drama equally well.

“I would like to play ‘Norma Rae’ and ‘Sophie’s Choice,’ but I never got the chance,” she once said, adding she had become typecast as a comic actor.

She had a flair for spontaneous humor, often playing David Letterman’s foil during guest appearances on NBC’s “Late Night With David Letterman” early in its run.

Her appearances became so frequent, and the pair’s good-natured bickering so convincing, that for a time rumors cropped up that they were romantically involved. Years later, Letterman credited those early appearances with helping make the show a hit.

It was also during those years that Garr began to feel “a little beeping or ticking” in her right leg. It began in 1983 and eventually spread to her right arm as well, but she felt she could live with it. By 1999 the symptoms had become so severe that she consulted a doctor. The diagnosis: multiple sclerosis.

For three years Garr didn’t reveal her illness.

“I was afraid that I wouldn’t get work,” she explained in a 2003 interview. “People hear MS and think, ‘Oh, my God, the person has two days to live.'”

After going public, she became a spokeswoman for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, making humorous speeches to gatherings in the U.S. and Canada.

“You have to find your center and roll with the punches because that’s a hard thing to do: to have people pity you,” she commented in 2005. “Just trying to explain to people that I’m OK is tiresome.”

What TV shows was Teri Garr on?

She also continued to act, appearing on “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit,” “Greetings From Tucson,” “Life With Bonnie” and other TV shows. She also had a brief recurring role on “Friends” in the 1990s as Lisa Kudrow’s mother. After several failed romances, Garr married contractor John O’Neill in 1993. They adopted a daughter, Molly, before divorcing in 1996.

In her 2005 autobiography, “Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood,” Garr explained her decision not to discuss her age.

“My mother taught me that showbiz people never tell their real ages. She never revealed hers or my father’s,” she wrote. California voting registration records gave her date of birth as Dec. 11, 1947.

She said she was born in Los Angeles, although most reference books list Lakewood, Ohio. As her father’s career waned, the family, including Teri’s two older brothers, lived with relatives in the Midwest and East.

The Garrs eventually moved back to California, settling in the San Fernando Valley, where Teri graduated from North Hollywood High School and studied speech and drama for two years at California State University, Northridge.

Garr recalled in 1988 what her father had told his children about pursuing a career in Hollywood.

“Don’t be in this business,” he told them. “It’s the lowest. It’s humiliating to people.”

Garr is survived by her daughter, Molly O’Neil, and a grandson, Tyryn.

Singer, dancer and actress Mitzi Gaynor, who wowed audiences in movie musicals like “South Pacific,” and became a fixture on TV variety shows and a headliner in Las Vegas, died Thursday. She was 93.

Gaynor died of natural causes in Los Angeles, according to an announcement by her representatives.

In an eight-decade career, Gaynor appeared in numerous musicals in the 1950s, including “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” “Anything Goes,” “Les Girls,” and the film version of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s smash hit “South Pacific.

Gaynor beat out a plethora of Hollywood stars, including Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor and Susan Hayward, who vied for the role of Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse who sings of how she wants to “wash that man right out of my hair.” Her performance in the blockbuster movie made her an international star, and earned her a Golden Globe nomination.

It was the peak of a string of Hollywood hits for Gaynor, but as musicals fell out of favor (her last film was the 1963 comedy “For Love or Money” with Kirk Douglas), she turned to concert performances. In 1961 she made her nightclub debut at the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, smashing box office records with her four-week residency.

She also turned to TV. She was a guest on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” on the same program that The Beatles made their second U.S. TV appearance. Seventy million people tuned in.

She appeared on variety shows hosted by Frank Sinatra, Donald O’Connor, Jack Benny, Danny Thomas and Perry Como.

Gaynor also starred in a string of over-the-top, hit TV specials, in which she sang and danced, and alerted audiences that she was always in on the joke. “I won’t do a number unless I can have a good time doing it,” she said.

She won a New York Emmy award for a documentary about her variety series, “Mitzi Gaynor: Razzle Dazzle! The Special Years.”

In 2019, then 88, Gaynor was still performing live, but due to a leg injury, sang while seated on stage, accompanied by singer and pianist Michael Feinstein. 

“It’s been quite some time since I’ve been able to really jig, but I want to go jigging again,” she said.  

She was born Francesca Mitzi Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber on Sept. 4, 1931, in Chicago. Her parents were Henry von Gerber, a Hungarian musical director and cellist, and Pauline Fisher Gerber, a former vaudeville dancer and aspiring songwriter.

After her parents’ divorce, Mitzi moved with her mother to Detroit, where she began classical ballet training. In 2019, Gaynor told “Sunday Morning” that when she was 11, her dance instructor said, “Mitzi’s gonna go to Hollywood and become a star.”

She did move to Los Angeles, and while in high school, “Frances Gerber” (as she was known) performed on stage alongside the prima ballerina of the Ballet Russe, Mia Slavenska, in a production of Tchaikovsky’s “Song Without Words.” 

She made her Broadway debut at 15 in “Gypsy Lady” in 1946, and performed in light opera productions in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and Philadelphia.

Not even 20, Mitzi Gerber was signed to a contract at 20th Century Fox. She recalled that a producer there thought her name sounded like a delicatessen, “so he said, ‘How about Gaynor, [like] Janet Gaynor?’ My father loved it.”

Her first major role was in “My Blue Heaven” (1950), starring Betty Grable and Dan Dailey. She quickly followed that with such lighthearted fare as “Down Among the Sweltering Palms,” “We’re Not Married,” “Bloodhounds of Broadway,” and “The I Don’t Care Girl.” She also starred in a western, “Three Young Texans.” 

In 1954 she earned some of her best reviews for Irving Berlin’s big-budget “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” showcasing her singing and comedic talents opposite Ethel Merman, Dan Dailey, Donald O’Connor, Johnny Ray and Marilyn Monroe. But before filming was even completed, 20th Century Fox informed Gaynor that they were ending their contract.

With her new husband, manager Jack Bean, Gaynor signed a new contract with Paramount, where she starred in the Bing Crosby musical “Anything Goes.” Other credits included the comedy “The Birds & The Bees,” with David Niven, and the Frank Sinatra drama “The Joker Is Wild.” She was directed by George Cukor in MGM’s “Les Girls,” opposite Gene Kelly, and then returned to Fox for “South Pacific.”

Her final films were comedic roles, in “Happy Anniversary,” “Surprise Package,” and “For Love or Money.” 

But she made further inroads in Vegas, where she became the city’s highest-paid female entertainer. In 1970 Gaynor became the first female performer to be awarded “Star Entertainer of the Year.” She was also the first star client for an up-and-coming costume designer named Bob Mackie. 

In 2017, Gaynor was inducted into The Great American Songbook Hall of Fame.

In 2019, Gaynor recalled to “Sunday Morning” her early romance with eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. She calculates they were together for eight months. Did she love him? “I thought I did. He asked me to marry him. Then I found out he’d asked 47 other women at the same time.”

Gaynor broke it off with Hughes, and left with quite the parting gift. “He said, ‘OK, I want you to buy some dirt.’ I said, ‘Some dirt?’ He said, ‘Yes, in Las Vegas.’ $25 an acre, which I sold maybe eight years ago for two million bucks.”

Cissy Houston, the mother of the late Whitney Houston and a two-time Grammy winner who performed alongside superstar musicians like Elvis Presley and Aretha Franklin, has died, CBS News confirmed. She was 91.

Houston died Monday morning in her New Jersey home while under hospice care for Alzheimer’s disease, her daughter-in-law Pat Houston said in a statement. The acclaimed gospel singer was surrounded by her family.

“Our hearts are filled with pain and sadness,” Pat Houston said in the statement, calling her mother-in-law “the matriarch of our family.” She said Cissy Houston’s contributions to popular music and culture are “unparalleled.”

“Mother Cissy has been a strong and towering figure in our lives. A woman of deep faith and conviction, who cared greatly about family, ministry, and community. Her more than seven-decade career in music and entertainment will remain at the forefront of our hearts.”

A church performer from an early age, Houston was part of a family gospel act before breaking through in popular music in the 1960s as a member of the prominent backing group The Sweet Inspirations with Doris Troy and her niece Dee Dee Warwick. The group sang backup for a variety of soul singers including Otis Redding, Lou Rawls, The Drifters and Dionne Warwick.

Houston’s many credits included Franklin’s “Think” and “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and Dusty Springfield’s “Son of a Preacher Man.” The Sweet Inspirations also sang on stage with Presley, whom Houston would remember fondly for singing gospel during rehearsal breaks and telling her that she was “squirrelly.”

“At the end of our engagement with him, he gave me a bracelet inscribed with my name on the outside,” she wrote in her memoir “How Sweet the Sound,” published in 1998. “On the inside of the bracelet he had inscribed his nickname for me: Squirrelly.”

The Sweet Inspirations had their own top 20 single with the soul-rock “Sweet Inspiration,” made in the Memphis studio where Franklin and Springfield among others recorded hits and released four albums just in the late ’60s. The group appeared on Van Morrison’s “Brown Eyed Girl” and sang background vocals for The Jimi Hendrix Experience on the song “Burning of the Midnight Lamp” in 1967.

Houston’s last performance with the Sweet Inspirations came after the group hit the stage with Presley in a Las Vegas show in 1969. Her final recording session with the group turned into their biggest R&B hit “(Gotta Find) A Brand New Lover,” a composition by the production team of Gamble & Huff, who appeared on the group’s fifth album, “Sweet Sweet Soul.”

During that time, the group occasionally performed live concert dates with Franklin. After the group’s success and four albums together, Houston left The Sweet Inspirations to pursue a solo career where she flourished.

Houston became an in-demand session singer and recorded more than 600 songs in multiple genres throughout her career. Her vocals can heard on tracks alongside a wide range of artists including Chaka Khan, Donny Hathaway, Jimi Hendrix, Luther Vandross, Beyoncé, Paul Simon, Roberta Flack and her daughter.

Houston went on to complete several records, including “Presenting Cissy Houston,” the disco-era “Think It Over” and the Grammy-winning gospel albums “Face to Face” and “He Leadeth Me.”

In 1971, Houston’s signature vocals were featured on Burt Bacharach‘s solo album, which includes “Mexican Divorce,” “All Kinds of People” and “One Less Bell to Answer.” She performed various standards including Barbra Streisand’s hit song, “Evergreen.”

Never far from her native New Jersey or musical origins, Houston presided for decades over the 200-member Youth Inspirational Choir at Newark’s New Hope Baptist Church, where Whitney Houston sang as a child.

Cissy Houston would say that she had discouraged her daughter from show business, but they were joined in music for much of Whitney’s life, from church to stage performances to television and film and the recording studio. Whitney’s rise seemed inevitable, not only because of her obvious talents, but because of her background: Dionne and Dee Dee Warwick were cousins, Leontyne Price a cousin once removed, Franklin a close family friend.

Whitney Houston made her debut on national television when she and Cissy Houston sang a medley of Franklin hits on “The Merv Griffin Show.” Cissy Houston sang backup on Whitney’s eponymous, multiplatinum first album, and the two shared the lead on “I Know Him So Well,” from the 1987 megaseller “Whitney.”

They would sing together often in concert and appeared in the 1996 film “The Preacher’s Wife.” Their most indelible moments likely came from the video for one of Whitney’s biggest hits from the mid-1980s, “Greatest Love of All.” It was filmed as a mother-daughter homage, ending with a joyous Whitney exiting the stage of Harlem’s Apollo Theater and embracing Cissy Houston, who stood in the wings.

On Feb. 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found dead — from what was ruled as an accidental drowning — in a Beverly Hills bathtub. Cissy Houston would write about her daughter in the memoir “Remembering Whitney: A Mother’s Story of Life, Loss and The Night The Music Stopped.”

In 2015, Cissy Houston was grieving again when granddaughter Bobbi Kristina Brown, the only child of Bobby Brown and Whitney Houston, was found unconscious in a bathtub, spent months in a coma and died at age 22. The family was back in the news in 2018 with the release of the documentary “Whitney,” which included allegations that Dee Dee Warwick (who died in 2008) had molested Whitney when she was a girl.

Cissy Houston was briefly married to Freddie Garland in the 1950s; their son, Gary Garland, was a guard for the Denver Nuggets and later sang on many of Whitney Houston’s tours. Cissy Houston was married to Whitney’s father, entertainment executive John Russell Houston, from 1959-1990. In addition to Whitney, the Houstons also had a son, Michael.

Cissy Houston was born Emily Drinkard in Newark, the youngest of eight children of a factory worker and a housewife. She was just 5 when she and three siblings founded the Drinkard Singers, a gospel group that lasted 30 years, performing on the same bill as Mahalia Jackson among others and releasing the 1959 album “A Joyful Noise.”

She later said she would have been happy to remain in gospel, but John Houston encouraged her to take on studio work. When rockabilly star Ronnie Hawkins (along with drummer Levon Helm and other future members of The Band) needed an extra voice, Cissy Houston stepped in.

“I wanted to get my work done, and get it done quickly. I was there, but I didn’t have to be part of them. I was in the world, but I wasn’t of the world, as St. Paul put it,” Houston wrote in “How Sweet the Sound,” remembering how she soon began working with the Drifters and other singers.

“At least in the recording studio we were living together as God intended us to. Some days, we spent 12 or 15 hours together there,” she wrote. “The skin-deep barriers of race seemed to fall away as we toiled side by side creating our little pop masterpieces.”

Pat Houston said she is thankful for the many valuable lessons learned from her mother-in-law. She said the family feels “blessed and grateful” that God allowed Cissy to spend so many years with them.

“We are touched by your generous support, and your outpouring of love during our profound time of grief,” Houston said on behalf of the family. “We respectfully request our privacy during this difficult time.”

Christopher Ciccone, an artist and former dancer who was also singer Madonna’s younger brother, has died, his rep Brad Taylor confirmed to CBS News. He was 63.

He died from cancer on Oct. 4, surrounded by his husband, Ray Thacker, Taylor said in a statement.

Born on Nov. 22, 1960, in Pontiac, Michigan, Ciccone was an artist, interior decorator and designer, who began his career as a dancer. He joined the Le Group de La Palace Royale in Ottawa in 1980 before moving to New York two years later to support his older sister’s music career as a backup dancer.

As Madonna’s career grew, Ciccone became more involved — serving as the art director on his sister’s Blond Ambition World Tour in 1990 and as the tour director for her The Girlie Show in 1993. He also directed music videos for megastars Dolly Parton and Tony Bennett in the 1990s.

His role expanded away from music when Ciccone took on the role of interior designer within the homes his sister owned and occupied in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles.

In 2012, Ciccone released his own shoe line, The Ciccone Collection, at London Fashion Week.

He told CBS News at the time that his goal is to make the brand “accessible to everybody” and not too pricey.

“The great thing about doing shoes is that potentially everyone could have a pair. When you’re doing art, there’s only one,” Ciccone said

Ciccone, who was openly gay, claimed that his sister outed him during her 1991 interview with The Advocate.

Ciccone released a tell-all autobiography called “Life With My Sister Madonna,” leading to reports that the two had been estranged, but Ciccone told CBS News in 2012 that he was glad he wrote the book. 

“I don’t regret any of that,” he said. “I think because of that it sort of led me to this. It gave people an opportunity to think of me as a creative person, as an artist and not just as Madonna’s brother, which is a tag I’m going to wear forever,” Ciccone said in 2012. “But I’m hopeful that at some point it will be Christopher Ciccone first. It’s cool…I’m perfectly happy being what I am.”

The two eventually made up.

“Our relationship is fine as far as I’m concerned,” he told CBS News.

Ciccone and Thacker — a British-born actor — married in 2016.

Ciccone’s death comes fewer than two weeks after the death of his and Madonna’s stepmother, Joan Clare Ciccone, from cancer. His eldest brother Anthony died in 2023.

Actor John Ashton, best known for his role as the by-the-book detective in the “Beverly Hills Cop” franchise, has died, his publicist Alan Somers confirmed to CBS News on Sunday. He was 76.

Ashton died Thursday in Ft. Collins, Colorado, after a battle with cancer.

“John was a loving husband, brother, father, and grandfather who will be deeply missed by all who knew him,” a statement said.

Ashton was born in Springfield, Massachusetts on Feb. 22, 1948, and raised in Enfield, Connecticut. He received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Southern California.

Throughout his 50-year career in show business, Ashton appeared in nearly 100 movies after making his debut in 1973’s “The Psychopath.”

He was probably best known for his role as Det. Sgt. John Taggart in the first two installments of the “Beverly Hills Cop” series alongside Eddie Murphy and Judge Reinhold. He reprised his role in 2024’s “Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F.”

Other film credits include “Some Kind of Wonderful,” “She’s Having a Baby,” “Midnight Run,” “Little Big League” and “Gone Baby Gone.”

On television, he played Willie Joe Garr on several episodes of “Dallas” and made an appearance on such shows like “Columbo,” “Police Squad!” “Hardball” and others.

“John devoted his career to honing his craft and bringing characters to life on the screen. His presence will be greatly missed,” Somers said.

Ashton is survived by his wife Robin Hoye, three children, three step-children and a grandson. He also leaves behind two sisters and a brother. 

“John leaves behind a legacy of love, dedication, and service. His memory will forever be treasured by his wife, children, grandchildren, as well as his brother, sisters, his extended family and all who loved him,” Somers said. “John’s impact on the world will be remembered and celebrated for generations to come.”

The family requests any donations in Ashton’s memory be made to Pathways Hospice Care

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.

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.

“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.

Emmet Lyons

contributed to this report.