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

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

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

Smith was often rated as the leading British actress of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a clutch of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She made her film debut in the 1950s, won Oscars for work in the 60s and 70s and had memorable roles in every decade that followed, including an older Wendy in the Peter Pan story “Hook” (1991) and a senior nun in Whoopi . Goldberg Comedy “Sister Act” (1992).

A leading stage actor, he played Shakespeare’s tragedy – the 1965 adaptation “Othello” – and voiced Shakespeare-inspired animation in “Gnomeo & Juliet” (2011).

She continued to be in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you get to grandma’s age, you’re lucky to have anything.”

Smith drily summed up her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why she took the role, she said: “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 beat Maggie Smith.”

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic school teacher from Edinburgh, brought her an Academy Award for best actress, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.

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

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

From 2010, she was the acid-tongued Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the hit TV period drama “Downton Abbey,” a role that won her legions of fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a slew of other award nominations. .

But she was rushing to television fame. When the show’s run ended in 2016, Smith said it was a relief. “It’s freedom,” he told The Associated Press.

“Not until ‘Downton Abbey’ was well known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible pictures,” he said.

He continued acting well into his 80s, in films including the 2019 big-screen spin-off to “Downton Abbey,” its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes over-the-top.

Richard Burton said that Smith did not take over a scene in “The VIPs” with him alone: ​​”She commits grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall found Smith “not remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots. She’s very hard on herself, and I don’t think she sees any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people too.”

Smith admitted he could be impatient at times.

“It’s true that I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I’m picky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing grumpy old women.”

The 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 newly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously drew a laugh from a loose line — “This haddock is disgusting” — in a 1964 revival of “Hay Fever.” Noel Coward.

He repeated the gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet asked wryly, “What’s a weekend?”

King Charles III and his wife Queen Camilla paid tribute to Smith, who was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, equivalent to a knight, by the late Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

“As the curtain falls on a national treasure, we join everyone around the world in remembering with the greatest admiration and affection for her wonderful performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through her off the stage and on stage,” they said in a statement.

Fellow actors paid tribute to her on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who played the character of Smith’s son in “Downton Abbey,” said that “anyone who has ever shared a scene with Maggie will testify to her sharp eye, sharp wit and tremendous talent.”

“She was a true legend in her generation and thankfully she will live on in so many magnificent screen performances,” he said in a statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said the experience was “unforgettable … sharing two shots was like being matched with a lion.”

“She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And he did not suffer fools. We will never see another one. Godspeed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote on X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Smith was “a true national treasure whose work will be treasured for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern outskirts of London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started acting, one is still acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to wartime duty in Oxford, where her theater studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, around the universities there. … If you were clever enough and fast enough I suppose, you could almost be a weekly representative because all the colleges do different productions at different times,” he said in an interview with the BBC.

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

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

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

Alan Bennett, when preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for boredom. As the actor Jeremy Brett said, “she starts divine and then goes away, rather like cheese.”

“So the fact that we only had enough time to do it was a complete blessing to be honest because it was so fresh and just like that,” Bennett said. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, an unsuspecting woman who lived for years in her van on Bennett’s Drive in London.

However extravagant he may have been on stage or in front of the cameras, Smith was known to be extremely private.

“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, she would disappear,” says Simon Callow, who performed with her in “A Room with a View.”

Smith married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby – who grew up to be actors – and divorced in 1975. The same year he married writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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Hilary Fox and Pan Pylas in London contributed to this story. Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.