Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning actress Maggie Smith played everything from wistful ingenues in Shakespeare to Harry Potter's Prof. McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey.
Oscar, Emmy, and Tony-winning actor Maggie Smith played everything from wistful ingenues in Shakespeare to Harry Potter's Prof. McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in "Downton Abbey." She died Friday at age 89.If you're enjoying this article, you'll love our daily newsletter, The LA Report. Each weekday, catch up on the 5 most pressing stories to start your morning in 3 minutes or less.
Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter's Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances asWhat Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early.
The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn't want to"sob all over Burt Reynolds."
That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess' most famously clueless question —"what is a weekend?" — might almost have been her own.Right now, you can help protect LAist's mission to provide local reporting to all in our community.
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