Maggie Smith won an Oscar for playing an actress who loses one
In California Suite, Maggie Smith played a British star who goes to Hollywood for the Academy Awards and goes home empty-handed. The part won her the 1978 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, making her the only person honoured for portraying a fictional nominee. It was her second Oscar, nearly a decade after the first.
Smith was born in Ilford in 1934 and moved to Oxford at four, where her father worked as a pathologist at the university. She left school at 16 to study acting at the Oxford Playhouse and made her stage debut there a year later as Viola in Twelfth Night. By 1956 she was on Broadway in a revue, and in 1962 she won the first of a record six Evening Standard awards for best actress.
Laurence Olivier spotted her at the Old Vic and recruited her into his new National Theatre company. According to the critic Michael Coveney, he quickly realised she was his match, and the two became fierce professional rivals: nobody had ever been quicker than him on stage. During a 1964 Othello, Olivier struck her so hard that she was knocked out. She played Desdemona to his Othello on film too, earning her first Oscar nomination.
Her first Academy Award came for the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the 1969 film about a charismatic Edinburgh teacher, which also brought her first BAFTA. Later nominations followed for Travels with My Aunt, A Room with a View and Gosford Park. On Broadway she won a Tony for Lettice and Lovage in 1990, the same year she was made a dame. Across her career she collected the rare Triple Crown of Oscar, Emmy and Tony.
A younger audience met her late. She played Professor McGonagall throughout the Harry Potter films from 2001 to 2011, and then became internationally famous all over again as the waspish Dowager Countess, Violet Crawley, in Downton Abbey, which won her three Emmys. Her career stretched across eight decades, taking in Hook, Sister Act and The Lady in the Van. She died in September 2024.
Source: Maggie Smith
