Dame Maggie Smith, one of Britain's most famous actresses, has died, her sons announced in a statement shared by her publicist Claire Dobbs.
She was 89 years old.
“It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. He passed away peacefully in hospital this morning, Friday 27th September. An extremely private person, she was at last surrounded by friends and family,” the statement said.
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“She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.
“We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unwavering kindness during his final days.”
Smith was born in 1934 in Ilford, then a middle-class east London suburb. The family moved to Oxford shortly before the Second World War began, where his father worked as a pathologist at the University of Oxford.
Upon graduating high school, Smith attended the Oxford Playhouse School from 1951 to 1953, and made her stage debut in an Oxford University Dramatic Society production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night.
She began appearing on Broadway in New Faces in 1956, and then played the lead comedian in the London revue “Share My Lettuce” between 1957 and 1958. She soon began appearing regularly in plays at The Old Vic Theater in London.
In 1964, she played Desdemona in Olivier's Othello, before reprising the role for the film version the following year.
Smith won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in 1969 for her role as an unconventional schoolteacher in the film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. In 1978, she was awarded a second Academy Award, this time for Best Supporting Actress, for her performance in Neil Simon's California Suite.
She has also received a British Academy Film Award for her work, including her roles in 1985's A Room with a View and 1987's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.
Smith was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 and has since become widely known as Dame Maggie Smith.
But in many ways, her best roles were yet to come, including a starring role in the 1999 classic Tea with Mussolini, about a group of upper-middle-class English women in Florence, Italy, during the time of Fascism. Which was directed by Franco. Zeffirelli.
She will perhaps be best remembered as an actress who managed to achieve not only longevity but even greater fame in later life.
She came to the attention of young audiences as the strict but fair witch teacher Minerva McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001), and also appeared in several Harry Potter sequels.
She again received praise on both sides of the Atlantic for her portrayal of the sharp-tongued Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey, the acclaimed period drama about the British aristocracy.
He received three Emmy Awards for the role, which he repeated for the 2019 feature-length film.
In her later years, Smith became a role model for aging gracefully, a process she handled with her traditional charm and wit.
When asked by UK magazine Women's World in 2017 why she did not go to more awards ceremonies, Smith replied: “I actually think if I went to Los Angeles for example, I think I would tell people Will scare… They don't see big people.”
Smith was married twice, to actor Robert Stephens – they divorced in 1974 – and then to playwright Beverley Cross, from 1975 until her death in 1998.
He is survived by two sons, actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens.
