Dame Maggie Smith, the British legend of the stage and screen who enjoyed a seven-decade career in show business, died on Friday.
She was 89.
Her sons Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin said in a statement, “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith.”
They added: “An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”
Smith, who was born in Ilford, England, on Dec. 28, 1934, was best known for playing stern Professor McGonagall in the eight “Harry Potter” films and the acerbic Dowager Countess of Grantham on “Downton Abbey.”
After that acclaimed TV costume drama ended its run in 2015 after five seasons, Smith said in an interview with Graham Norton that she heaved a sigh of relief.
“By the time we were finished, she must’ve been 110,” Smith joked of her aging character. “She couldn’t go on and on and on. It didn’t make sense.”
The actress also admitted she never once watched the massively popular series. “I’ve got the box set,” she said.
Smith nonetheless played vicious Violet Crawley in two successful films: 2019’s “Downton Abbey” and 2022’s “Downton Abbey: A New Era.”
But, outside of “Downton” and “Potter,” the classically trained performer took on an extraordinary breadth of roles — from Shakespearean ingenues to strict nuns — for which she won two Academy Awards, four Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards, five BAFTA Awards and a Tony Award.
Smith got her start onstage at 17, playing Viola in a production of “Twelfth Night” in Oxford, England, in 1952. Just five years later, she made her Broadway debut in “Faces of ‘56” at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre.
Over the next 34 years, she appeared in three more Broadway shows, including Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” in 1975 and “Lettice and Lovage” in 1990.
The actress loved the theater, appearing in countless West End shows, spending eight years with Britain’s Royal National Theatre and then performing in Shakepeare plays at the Stratford Festival in Canada from 1976 to 1980.
On the big screen, Smith won her first Oscar for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” in 1970. And, among other films, she appeared in two starry Agatha Christie adaptations: 1970’s “Death On The Nile,” with Peter Ustinov, Angela Lansbury, Bette Davis and Mia Farrow, and 1982’s “Evil Under The Sun,” with Diana Rigg, Roddy McDowall and Sylvia Miles.
Then, in the ’90s and aughts, she played a series of beloved character parts: staunch Mother Superior in “Sister Act” and “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit,” socialite Gunilla in “The First Wives Club” and Constance in “Gosford Park” — another dowager countess.
Smith was treated for breast cancer during filming of “Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince” in the aughts and said the exhausting experience of being ill while shooting pushed her to retire from stage acting.
“It leaves you so flattened,” she told the Times of London in 2009.
But she couldn’t stay away. Smith returned to the boards in 2019, in a London production of “A German Life” at the Bridge Theatre.
While Smith was devoted to her work, she shunned the spotlight.
“She’s an old-fashioned star,” her biographer, theater critic Michael Coveney, told The Post in 2015.
“Her contract is with the audience, and that’s the end of it. She doesn’t do meet-and-greets. She doesn’t bother with the red carpet. And she cannot cope with this new celebrity she has from ‘Downton Abbey.’ Somebody told her that her last birthday was tweeted 7 million times. She literally fell over.”
When Coveney told Smith an updated version of the book was being published, Smith responded as if she really was the Dowager Countess.
“You’re digging me up — again?”