Get the latest gossip

Maggie Smith, star of stage, film and ‘Downton Abbey,’ has died aged 89

Maggie Smith, who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and won new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, has died at 89.

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful, scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1969 and gained new fans in the 21st century as the dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, died Friday. Smith was frequently rated the preeminent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies. Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Get the Android app