Maggie Smith, the accomplished, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham and Professor Minerva McGonagall in “Downton Abbey” Received. The Harry Potter films died on Friday. She was 89 years old.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves behind two sons and five beloved grandchildren, who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” he said in a statement released through publicist Claire Dobbs.

With an Academy Award nomination and a shelf full of acting trophies, Smith was often rated the leading British female artist of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench.

She remained in demand well into her later years, despite her lament that “when you get to grandma’s age, you’re lucky to get anything at all.”

Smith summarized her later roles, including Professor McGonagall, as “a gallery of weirdos”. Asked why he took the role, he said: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in the television production of “Suddenly Last Summer”, said that she was “the most intellectually astute actress I have ever worked with.” To beat Maggie Smith, you have to get up very early in the morning.”

“Jean Brodie”, in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, won her an Academy Award for Best Actress and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) in 1969.

Smith won a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “Room with a View”, and lead actress roles in “A Private Function” and “A Room with a View” in 1984. Added BAFTA for. in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations for supporting actress roles in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA Award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, he won a Tony Award in 1990 for “Lettuce and Lovage”.

In 2012 his work garnered three Golden Globe nominations for the globally successful “Downton Abbey” TV series and the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet”.

Smith was known for being tough and sometimes beating others.

Richard Burton commented that Smith did not just have a scene with him in “The VIPs”: “She steals the show.” However, director Peter Hall found that Smith “isn’t too difficult to play as long as he’s not one of the idiots.” He’s very hard on himself, and I don’t think he sees any reason why he shouldn’t be hard on other people too.”

Smith admitted that she could be impatient at times.

Smith said, “It’s true that I don’t tolerate fools, but they don’t tolerate me, that’s why I’m irritable.” “Maybe that’s why I’m so good at playing prickly old ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in his review of “Lettuce and Lovage” in The New York Times, praised Smith, saying, “He is the stylish classicist who can deliver the line ‘Don’t you have any marmalade?’ Could italicize as.” Unless it sounds like an inscription freshly coined by Coward or Wilde.

Smith famously drew laughter from a prosaic line – “This haddock is disgusting” – in the 1964 revival of Noël Coward’s “Hay Fever”.

“But unfortunately the critics mentioned it, and after that it never got a laugh,” he recalled. “When you say something weird it becomes nonsense. It’s really gone.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on 28 December 1934 in Ilford, in the east end of London. He summarized his life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started acting, one is still acting.”

His father was posted on wartime duty to Oxford in 1939, where his theater studies were offset by a busy apprenticeship at the Oxford Playhouse School.

“You know, I did a lot of work at the universities there. …If you were smart enough, and I think you were quick enough, you could rep almost weekly because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” he said in the BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theatre.

Laurence Olivier saw his talent, invited him to be part of his original National Theater company and cast him as his co-star in the 1965 film adaptation of “Othello”.

Smith said that two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, were both important influences in National Theater productions.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils”, said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for being bored. As actor Jeremy Brett said, “She starts out divine and then ends up like cheese.”

“So the fact that we had enough time to do it was really an absolute blessing because she was so fresh and so good at it,” said Bennett, who played Smith in “The Lady in the Van”. A starring role was also written for him. ,

No matter how extravagant she was on stage or in front of the camera, Smith was known to be intensely private.

Simon Callow, who starred with her in “A Room with a View”, said that she ruined their first meeting by complimenting them.

“I spewed all kinds of nonsense about her and she kind of backed off. “She didn’t like that kind of stuff at all,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was afraid to talk about because if she did, it would disappear.

Smith was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1990, the equivalent of a knight.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, and divorced in 1975. That same year he married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.