DameMaggie Smith was a beloved actress and died at the age of 89

The Dowager Countess: A Prayer for the Lady in the Van and For The Rest of the House. An Address from Dame Maggie Smith

DameMaggie worked for seven decades, in a career that spanned seven decades, and almost never stopped working. Those of us who work this shift may especially cherish a line she uttered as the Dowager Countess: “What is a weekend?”

I have other fish to fry, you know, I don’t need you doing me a favor. A man on the pavement told me if I went south of the river I’d be welcomed with open arms.”

Dame Maggie Smith played a homeless woman named Mary Shepard in the film, “The Lady in the Van,” who was sheltered in a van in Alan Bennett’s driveway for 15 years. She is friendly, but very grateful to him.

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“I influence them to be aware of all the possibilities of life. Of beauty, honor, courage. Miss McKay, I do not influence them to look for things that don’t exist. I am going. When my class convenes, they will find me composed, and prepared to review for them a succession of the Stuarts.”

But Dame Maggie was also Professor Minerva McGonagall of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the Harry Potter films; and the Mother Superior in “Sister Act,” starring Whoopi Goldberg as a nightclub singer on the run who hides in a convent; and she won an Academy Award for her portrayal of a free-thinking teacher in a proper British girls school in the 1969 film, “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie:”

According to the British critic Barry Norman, the joke was not actually that amusing, as it was that he was always in corsets. “And I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots.”

She played the leading roles in Shaw, Ibsen, Stoppard and Shakespeare on stage and screen, including Desdemona to Sir Laurence Oliver’s Othello, and of course in recent years, Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey.”

By the time Dame Maggie Smith left the stage yesterday, at the age of 89, a lot of people might have thought she’d been born with that honorific title.

Smith’s second act in her career as a chaperone in A Room With a View, as the mother superior in Sister Act, and as the cranky hotel cook in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel were all done before she became known as a comic genius.

She declared that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody” when she said that he was slaughtering all comers for most of the movie. As well he might.

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Playwrights were also taken by it. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He wrote a book for her, in order to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing. “And above all wit — her presence is witty. “

The career of Smith included being a Commander of the Order of the British Empire and a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor. Her fame grew out of what she already knew. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).

And while she was casting spells on kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV’s Downton Abbey, where for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloof, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.

All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn’t want to “sob all over Burt Reynolds.”

The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. She began her acting career in 2000 with six films, including Travels With My Aunt and Death On the Nile, which earned her two Academy Awards. She won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2001 for Death On the Nile, as well as a second statuette for Best Supporting Actress in 2002 for

What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early. She graduated from Britain’s National Theater, the West End and Broadway after just a few years of performing, which made her perfect for delivering the barbs of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.

Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey’s formidable Lady Violet.

Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would’ve dared try.