Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

Sep 27, 2024 - 21:31
 0
Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

She had won an extraordinary array of awards, from Oscars to Emmys to Tonys, yet still went almost universally unrecognized. Then came Downton Abbey. Maggie Smith was one of the finest British stage and film actresses of her generation, with award-winning roles ranging from a free-spirited Scottish schoolteacher in The Best of Miss Jean Brodie to an acerbic countess in Downton Abbey. " She died in London on Friday. She was 89. She died in  hospital,  her family said in a statement from a spokesman.

The statement did not give a cause of death.  American moviegoers  knew little about Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her compatriots) until she appeared in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969), a film about a girls' schoolteacher who ventures into progressive social activities in the 1930s.

The scenery, and  love life. Vincent Canby's review in The New York Times called her performance "a beautiful mix of contrapuntal moods, vocal inflections, and indirect emotion, all just right." She won her second Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in California Suite (1978), an adaptation of a  Neil Simon stage comedy. Her character, a British actress, attends the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing night at the ceremony, and a bittersweet night in bed.

In real life, prizes had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in the 1950s, when at 20 she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.

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