Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actor whose work ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, has died at the age of 89.

The news was confirmed by her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement. They said: “She passed away peacefully in hospital this morning, Friday 27 September.

“She was an intensely private person and was ultimately with friends and family. She is survived by two sons and five loving grandchildren, devastated by the loss of their special mother and grandmother.

“We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and continued kindness during her final days.

“We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”

Smith’s gift for acid-tongued comedy was perhaps the source of her greatest achievements: the waspish teacher Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, early period yarns like A Room With a View and Gosford Park, and a series of onstage collaborations. and screen with Alan Bennett including The Lady in the Van. “My career is at stake,” she told the Guardian in 2004. ‘I think I’ve been pigeonholed in terms of humor… When you do comedy, you don’t really count. Comedy is never considered real.” However, Smith also excelled in non-comedic dramatic roles, appearing opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning a best actress Bafta for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler.

Born in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford and began acting at the city’s Playhouse theater as a teenager. While she appeared in a series of stage shows, including Bamber Gascoigne’s 1957 musical comedy Share My Lettuce opposite Kenneth Williams, Smith also made waves in film, making her first substantial impact in the 1958 Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Bafta. After starring in Peter Shaffer’s double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith was invited by Olivier in 1962 to join the emerging National Theater company, for whom she appeared in a series of productions, including as Desdemona in Olivier’s Othello in his infamous blackface production in 1964. (Smith repeated the role in Olivier’s film version the following year, for which they were both Oscar nominated.)

In 1969 she was cast in the lead role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel about the Edinburgh schoolteacher who admired Mussolini; Smith went on to win the Oscar for Best Actress in 1970. Later that year she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theater in London’s West End; Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard described her as “haunting the stage like a giant Modigliani portrait, her alabaster skin stretched taut with hidden fear.” Another Oscar nomination for Best Actress came in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels with My Aunt, and an Oscar win (for Best Supporting Actress) in 1979 for California Suite, the Neil Simon-penned anthology piece in which she won an Oscar. played. -nominated movie star.

Smith continued her successful parallel film and stage career in the 1980s. She starred opposite Michael Palin in A Private Function, the war comedy about food rationing co-written by Alan Bennett, and had a colorful supporting role as gossiping cousin Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, for which she played the lead role. nominated for yet another Oscar. She followed it up with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a character study in which Smith played the unmarried, frustrated woman of the title. On stage she played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival theater in Canada, and in 1987 she starred as tour guide Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. She also reunited with Bennett for his Talking Heads series on both radio and TV, playing a pastor’s wife who was having an affair.

Film roles continued to roll in: she starred opposite Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s loosely autobiographical Tea With Mussolini, a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s rural murder mystery Gosford Park, and opposite Judi Dench in Ladies in Lavender, written and directed by Karel Dans. She also accepted the prominent role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, appearing in every episode except Deathly Hallows Part 1 between 2001 and 2011. Meanwhile, she took on perhaps her most impactful TV role as the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes – who reprises the role in two standalone cinema films, released in 2019 and 2022. After playing the role on stage in 1999, Smith enjoyed a late-career triumph in The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett’s memoir about the woman who lived in his driveway.

Smith was married twice: to fellow actor Robert Stephens between 1967 and 1975, and to Beverley Cross between 1975 and his death in 1998.