Actress Maggie Smith dies at 89: NPR

Oscar-, Emmy- and Tony-winning actress Maggie Smith has played everything from wistful geniuses in Shakespeare to Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall and the Dowager Countess. Downton Abbey. She died on Friday at the age of 89.

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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and spanned stage and screen – has died aged 89. She died peacefully on Friday morning surrounded by her family and friends, her publicist confirmed.

Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. At the end of her career, no one would have dared to try.

Although she had delicate features and was barely 5 feet 7 inches tall, casting directors realized early on that her characters would inevitably seem indomitable, regardless of whether she was full of profanities as the “Harry Potter” professor in “Shaw.” McGonagall casts spells or silences opponents sideways glances as Downton Abbeyis the impressive Lady Violet.

Act One: Precise diction in its prime

What Maggie Smith learned about captivating an audience, she learned early on. She entered the professional stage as a teenager and quickly graduated to Britain’s National Theatre, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the peaks of Restoration comedy and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let them play the kind of chatterbox in which George Bernard Shaw wrote The millionaire, and it was sometimes difficult for her co-stars to speak out.

Almost as uninterrupted was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 – her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls’ school The heyday of Miss Jean Brodie.

“Give me a gherll of an impressive age,” she purred, “and she’ll be mine for life.”

In fact, the character wasn’t yet in his prime, but Smith certainly was. Over the next eight years she appeared in six films including Traveling with my aunt And Death on the Nile, triumphed on television in all of Shakespeare’s works The Merchant of Venice To The Carol Burnett Showand on stage he held title roles Hedda Gabler To Peter Pan.

Maggie Smith in February 1969.

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All this before he won another Oscar with Neil Simons California Suitebecause she plays multiple characters, including a conniving actress who is herself an Oscar nominee and at one point gives a deliciously self-deprecating acceptance speech in which she says she doesn’t want to “cry over Burt Reynolds.”

There are no sobs in Smith’s actual Oscars acceptance speech. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.

Act Two: The best exotic roles, some of which were written just for her

All of this happened long before a kind of second act in Smith’s career, in which she acted neat and tidy as a chaperone A room with a vieworiginally funny like the superior in Sister law with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky The best exotic Marigold hotel Movies even crazier than the woman who lived in Alan Bennett’s driveway The lady in the vanand almost viper-like as the mother of Ian McKellen’s “King” in Shakespeare Richard III.

Even though he had been slaughtering all comers for most of the film at this point, her statement that he was “proud, subtle, cunning and bloody” was so vicious that McKellen looked shaken. He could do that too.

Contemporary playwrights had also taken note of this. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus And Equusrecalled being once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettuce and lovage specifically for her, via a wildly resourceful tour guide, “to celebrate her joy and her splendor and her perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And most of all, humor – her presence is funny.”

Third Act: From Harry Potter to Downton

And then Smith’s career – for which she was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and later a Dame and a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honor – had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of proportion to that of what she had known before. Children recognized her on the street Harry Potter Films (she was in all but one).

Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham Downton Abbey.

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And while she charmed children, their parents and grandparents watched her every utterance on television Downton Abbeywhere for six seasons she brought a capricious sense of humor to the kind of woman she never was in real life – distant, demanding, undiplomatic, impatient, argumentative, secretive and so thoroughly winning that audiences couldn’t get enough theirs.

At least that’s what Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. For seven decades, Maggie Smith left audiences wanting more of her presence, although she worked so tirelessly that the Dowager Countess’s most famous clueless question – “What’s a weekend?” – could almost have been her own.