Maggie Smith

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Dame Maggie Smith
Maggie Smith in Gosford Park (2001).
Birth name	Margaret Natalie Smith
Born	December 28, 1934 Ilford, Essex, England
Academy  Awards	Best Actress, 1969 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Best Supporting Actress, 1978 California Suite

Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, DBE (born 28 December 1934), better known as Dame Maggie Smith, is a two-time Academy Award-winning British film, stage, and television actress.

[edit] Early life

Smith was born in Ilford, then in the county of Essex but now part of the London borough of Redbridge, to Nathaniel Smith, who worked at Oxford University, and Margaret Hutton Little, who was Scottish; she has two older twin brothers, Alistair and Ian. She studied at Oxford High School although she has been quoted as having not enjoyed the experience, at a time when the likes of Lady Antonia Fraser would have been amongst her peers.

[edit] Career

Maggie Smith as Prof. McGonagall in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, this was her fourth of (currently) five appearences as the Hogwarts professor.

She started her career at the Oxford Playhouse with Frank Shelley, and made her first film in 1956. In 1969 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as an unorthodox Scottish schoolteacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was also awarded the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the brittle actress, Diana Barrie, in California Suite. Other notable roles include the querulous Charlotte Bartlett in the Merchant-Ivory production of A Room with a View and a vivid supporting turn as the aged Duchess of York in Ian McKellen's film of Richard III. Given the international success of the Harry Potter movies, she is possibly most widely known to younger filmgoers in the role of Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.

Throughout her career, Smith has been admired for her remarkable technique, on both stage and screen. She has the ability to project a quality of deep emotion (whether comic or tragic) balanced by an innate reserve that combines the appearance of steely control and a hint of something approaching hysteria. Off stage, however, she is perceived as a reserved and private person and is perhaps not held in the general public's affections in the same way as her good friend, Dame Judi Dench. To her legion of devoted and sometimes fanatical admirers, however, she is one of the great actresses of film and theatre with an idiosyncratic style quite unlike anyone else; it was during the 1970s when some of her harsher critics had tired of what they saw as her irritating mannerisms that she moved to Canada to find a new direction in both her art and in her personal life as she had recently become divorced.

On stage, she has played the title character in the stage production of Alan Bennett's Lady in the Van and starred as Peter Pan in J. M. Barrie's fairytale story Peter Pan. She won a Tony Award in 1990 for Best Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage, starring as an eccentric tour guide in an English stately home.

She was created a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1970, and raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1990.

[edit] Private life

Smith has been married twice. She married Robert Stephens on 29 June 1967, at the Greenwich Registry office and had two sons with him: actors Chris Larkin (born 1967) and Toby Stephens (born 1969). They divorced on 6 May 1974.

She married Beverly Cross (on 23 August 1975 at Guildford Registry Office) and the marriage ended with his death on 20 March 1998.At the time of his death she was appearing in A Delicate Balance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket yet with characteristic fortitude she continued to the end of the run.

In the late 1980s she became quite seriously ill with Graves Disease and took some considerable time away from acting to recouperate.

[edit] Awards and Nominations

[edit] Academy Awards

• 1965 - Nominated - Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Othello
• 1969 - Won - Best Actress in a Leading Role - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
• 1972 - Nominated - Best Actress in a Leading Role - Travels With My Aunt
• 1978 - Won - Best Actress in a Supporting Role - California Suite
• 1986 - Nominated - Best Actress in a Supporting Role - A Room with a View
• 2001 - Nominated - Best Actress in a Supporting Role - Gosford Park

[edit] Stage awards

• 1984: London Evening Standard Award for Best Actress, for The Way of the World

[edit] Selected filmography

• Go To Blazes, 1962, Chantal
• The V.I.P.s, 1963, Miss Mead
• Othello, 1965, Desdemona
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 1969, Jean Brodie
• Travels With My Aunt, 1972, Aunt Augusta
• Murder by Death, 1976, Dora Charleston
• Death on the Nile, 1978, Miss Bowers
• California Suite, 1978, Diana Barrie
• Quartet, 1981, Lois Heidler
• Clash of the Titans, 1981, Thetis
• Evil Under the Sun, 1982, Daphne Castle
• The Missionary, 1982, Lady Isabel Ames
• A Private Function, 1984, Joyce Chilvers
• A Room with a View, 1985, Charlotte Bartlett
• The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, 1987, Judith Hearne
• Hook, 1991, Granny Wendy
• Sister Act, 1992, Mother Superior
• Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit, 1993, Mother Superior
• The Secret Garden, 1993, Mrs. Medlock

Maggie Smith (top left) on the poster of Ladies in Lavender

• Richard III, 1995, Duchess of York
• The First Wives Club, 1996, Gunilla Garson Goldberg
• The Last September, 1999, Lady Myra Naylor
• Tea With Mussolini, 1999, Lady Hester Random
• Gosford Park, 2001, Constance, Countess of Trentham
• Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Sorcerer's Stone in the US), 2001, Minerva McGonagall
• Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, 2002, Caro Eliza Bennett
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, 2002, Minerva McGonagall
• My House in Umbria, 2003, Emily Delahunty
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, 2004, Minerva McGonagall
• Ladies in Lavender, 2004, Janet Widdington
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, 2005, Minerva McGonagall
• Keeping Mum, 2005, Grace Hawkins
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, 2007, Minerva McGonagall (in production)

[edit] External links

• Maggie Smith at the Internet Movie Database
• You have to laugh - The Guardian, November 20, 2004, in-depth interview and profile.