By Johnny Oleksinski
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 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.”
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 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?”