Maggie Smith has died at the age of 89, her family has confirmed. “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith,” her two sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, wrote in a statement. “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September. 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 won two Oscars over the course of her storied career—for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1970 and California Suite in 1979—with four further Academy Award nominations, not to mention five BAFTA wins, to her name. Before she was sweeping up at awards season, though, Smith was a sylph-like British talent carving out a stellar reputation on the West End stage. The Essex-born actor kicked off her career playing Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse, where she studied her craft. It was the beginning of a love affair with the Bard that has endured over the decades: she played Desdemona in Othello (and earned her first Oscar nomination for her performance in the 1965 film adaptation) and starred as Queen Elizabeth, Lady Macbeth, and Cleopatra on stage in the late ’70s.
But her body of work was by no means all theater canon. Smith appeared in comedy capers, Merchant Ivory classics and commercial juggernauts like the Harry Potter franchise, not to mention some stone-cold ’90s classics, The First Wives Club and Sister Act among them. Over the course of 70 years in the spotlight, there wasn’t a genre she didn’t conquered or an emotion she failed to capture.
Below, 20 vintage photographs of the much-loved Maggie Smith from her days as a radiant rising star.
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