At 89, Maggie Smith takes final bow

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. She was 89.

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

“She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

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. She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.” Smith drily summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she quipped: “Harry Potter is my pension.” Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of Suddenly Last Summer, said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I've ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.” Jean Brodie, in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her the Academy Award for best actress, and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well in 1969.