Maggie Smith, lover of irritation on stage and screen – ThePrint – ReutersFeed

LONDON (Reuters) – Dame Maggie Smith, who died on Friday aged 89, was a perfectionist who turned anxiety into an art form and was hailed as one of the great actresses of stage and screen.

One of the few actors to win triple Oscars (twice), Emmys (four times) and Tonys, Smith moved effortlessly between playing Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde on stage in the “Harry Potter” film franchise and the hit television series “ Downton Abbey.”

““I wish I could just walk into Harrods and ask for a personality,” she once said. “”It would make life so much easier.”

Perhaps her concern about her apparent lack of personality was what encouraged her to face so many others.

Her first Oscar nomination was for playing Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s “Othello” in 1965, before winning her first Oscar for her role as an Edinburgh schoolteacher in 1969’s “Miss Jean Brodie’s First.” .

The second was for her supporting role in the 1978 comedy “California Suite”, where she lay next to Michael Caine.

Other critically acclaimed roles included Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest on the West End stage, a bitterly struggling 92-year-old senile in Edward Albee’s Three Tall Women, and her role in the film Noir 2001 comedy film “Gosford Park”.

‘HARRY POTTER’ AND ‘DOWNTON ABBEY’ STAR

In the 21st century, she was best known as Professor McGonagall in all seven “Harry Potter” films, and the Dowager Countess in the hit TV series and “Downton Abbey” spin-off films, a role that seemed tailor-made for her. she. an actress known for nasty comments and snide jokes.

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Essex, northeast London. She moved to Oxford as a child when her father, a pathologist, took up a position at the university, and she began acting in the local theater at age 17.

His big break came in 1956 with “New Faces” on Broadway. His 1958 role in the British crime film “Nowhere to Go” earned him a BAFTA nomination.

The following years saw a series of acclaimed roles in films (including “Travels with My Aunt”, “A Room with a View” and “The Secret Garden”), on stage (“Lettice and Lovage”, “Virginia”). and on television (“David Copperfield”, “My House in Umbria”).

Critic Irving Wardle hailed a mouth that twitched from a wide, inviting smile to the “poison sucked from a cornered ermine” — something she put to good use in “Downton Abbey.”

For many viewers, his turn in the blockbuster historical series that ran on television from 2010 to 2015 was the best reason to watch it, and won him several awards — although it did little for his desire for a private life.

“I led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey.’ I’m not kidding. I went to theaters, galleries, things like that, alone. And now I can’t and that’s horrible,” she said at the BFI Radio Times festival in 2017.

Smith was known for being demanding of herself and others. Theater director Peter Hall, who worked closely with her for many years, said: ““She bothers herself until she gets to perfection.”

She had a tempestuous eight-year marriage to actor Robert Stephens, which ended while they were playing recently-entangled divorcees in Noel Coward’s “Private Lives.” They had two sons – actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin.

Smith then married her teenage sweetheart, the writer Beverley Cross, a rock of imperturbability to her until his death in 1998.

In 1990, Smith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and became a Dame.

(Reporting by David Cutler and Rosalba O’Brien; Editing by Diane Craft and Kevin Liffey)

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