British actress Maggie Smith, known worldwide for her roles in “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey”, has died at 89

Multi-awarded, she acquired worldwide notoriety playing the role of Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” saga.

Fans of Harry Potter, and more generally of Maggie Smith’s work, are in mourning. The famous British actress, aged 89, died, her family announced on Friday September 27. Awarded in particular with two Oscars, three Golden Globes and six Baftas, Maggie Smith reached a wide audience by playing Professor Minerva McGonagall in the saga of Harry Potterbut also Countess Violet Crawley in the series Downton Abbey.

“She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning” said his sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. “She was a very private person, but she was with her friends and family at the end of her life. She leaves two loving sons and five grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother. “

Although she is best known to the public for her roles in films Harry Potter and the series Downton Abbeylater released in cinema, his rich filmography also includes, in particular, Death on the Nile, Hook or Captain Hook’s Revenge, Sister Act And Gosford Park.

Born on December 28, 1934 in Ilford, Essex (south-east of England), Margaret Smith began on the stages of the Oxford Playhouse in the early 1950s. She then joined the troupe of the London theater of the Old Vic then that of the Royal National Theatre, where she enjoyed a string of successes alongside her husband, the actor Robert Stephens.

Her film career took off in the 1960s and in 1970 she won the Oscar for best actress for Miss Brodie’s beautiful years. She will be rewarded again as best actress in a supporting role in 1979, for the film California Hotel.

Her marriage to Robert Stephens, an alcoholic, unfaithful and depressive, with whom she had two sons, collapsed in 1973. She divorced in 1975 and remarried shortly afterward to the playwright Beverley Cross, with whom she went to live and work in Canada. A complete artist, she was known for her humor and her concern for perfection, veering towards ferocity. “It’s true that I don’t tolerate fools, and therefore they don’t tolerate me, and so I bristle. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing cantankerous old ladies.”she declared to the British daily The Guardian in 2014.

She had thus excelled by playing the very snobbish and chilling Lady Constance in the film Gosford Park by Robert Altman (2001), whose screenwriter was already Julian Fellowes, who wrote Downton Abbey.

She “can capture in one moment more than many actors can convey in an entire film. She can be vulnerable, fierce, dark and hilarious at the same time and brings to the set every day the energy and curiosity of a young actor who comes to begin”said Nicholas Hytner, who directed her in The Lady in the Van (2015).

Maggie Smith survived breast cancer diagnosed in 2007 and participated in the filming of the film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009) while she was undergoing chemotherapy treatment. “I was as bald as an egg.”had confided to Times in 2009 the actress, who had to wear a wig. She also suffered from Graves’ disease, an autoimmune pathology of the thyroid which causes the eye to move out of its socket.

Maggie Smith was made a Lady Commander (DBE) of the Order of the British Empire in 1990 by Queen Elizabeth II for “services rendered to the performing arts”and made a companion of honor in 2014.