• Name: Maggie Smith
  • Date of Birth: December 28, 1934
  • Place of Birth: Ilford, Essex, England, UK
Mini-bio: 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 schoolteac...( read more)her in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. She was also awarded the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as a brittle actress in California Suite. Other notable roles include the querulous cousin Charlotte 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.




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.
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Birth Name: Margaret Natalie Smith

Date of Birth
: 28 Decembar 1934, Ilford, Essex, England, UK

flixster.actor.pane.162652436 - flixster

Maggie Smith mini-bio
:


One of the most revered and rewarded actresses on both sides of the Atlantic, Maggie Smith has created a gallery of characters who run the gamut from repressed spinsters to comical eccentrics. The attractive redhead with the distinctly adenoidal voice, the youngest daughter of a pathologist with ties to Oxford, decided to pursue an acting career while still in her teens.
She started her career at the Oxford Playhouse with Frank Shelley, and made her first film in 1956.
The Sixties were a heady time for Smith. In addition to building her impressive resume with acclaimed roles, she embarked on a torrid love affair with the still-married Robert Stephens, causing a minor scandal when she gave birth to their first child in June 1967. (They married ten days after son Christopher's birth.) She and Stephens co-starred as illicit lovers in "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie" (1969), but critics and audiences were captivated more by her performance as the neurotic and fascistic Scottish schoolteacher. Indeed, her portrayal of Jean Brodie was so impressive it earned the Best Actress Academy Award. 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.
Having taken time out to give birth to a second son in 1969, Smith was back at the top of her game in 1972 headlining a London revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" and starring as the oddball relative sojourning across Europe in "Travels With My Aunt", a performance that netted her a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Following the collapse of her union with Stephens and her second marriage to playwright and old beau Beverley Cross, the actress spent much of the mid- to late 70s in North America.
If she wasn't appearing in various classic roles at Stratford, Ontario, she was making films, like the Neil Simon spoof "Murder By Death" (1976) or the Agatha Christie adaptation "Death on the Nile" (1978). Simon provided her with one of her richest roles in his "California Suite" (1978), that of Diana Barrie, an insecure British actress coping with a crumbling marriage and the spotlight glare brought on by an Academy Award nomination. Although her onscreen character may have lost the coveted statue, Smith took home her second Oscar for her nuanced portrayal. In 1979, she returned to Broadway recreating her London success in Tom Stoppard's play "Night and Day."
Playwright Peter Shaffer especially tailored his stage comedy "Lettice and Lovage", about an outlandish tour guide, for the actress and it proved a triumph in both London and New York, where she added a Tony Award to her trophy collection. Smith was lovely was the aged Wendy Darling in "Hook" (1991), although playing a character much older than herself led to typecasting. For much of the rest of the decade, her on screen personae tended to dour, elderly types, ranging from the tart Mother Superior in "Sister Act" (1992) and its 1993 sequel to her Emmy-nominated turn as Southern matriarch in the small screen remake of "Suddenly, Last Summer" (PBS) to the Duchess of York in Ian McKellen's film "Richard III" (1995). Director Agnieszka Holland tapped into similar qualities casting Smith as the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs. Medlock in "The Secret Garden" (1993) and as the meddlesome aunt in "Washington Square" (1997). Although she was enjoying a strong career as a character player in films, Smith did not neglect the theater, appearing in several high profile, critically-acclaimed performances.
Heading back to the big screen, Smith was impressive as a grande dame in Italy flixster.actor.pane.162652436 - flixsterwhose misguided admiration for Benito Mussolini recalled Jean Brodie's admiration of Franco in "Tea with Mussolini" (1998).
Her next screen role as the stern, shape-shifting Professor Minerva McGonagle in "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (2001) perhaps brought her to her widest audience and earned her a legion of new, young fans. She reprised the role in the sequels.
Smith earned nearly unanimous praise for her scene-stealing portrayal of the tart-tongued, imperious Countess of Trentham in the Robert Altman-directed "Gosford Park" (2001). Smith next graced the big screen in "Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood" (2002) before embarking on what was one of the most anticipated theatrical events in a long time, her first on stage teaming with Judi Dench in David Hare's new play "The Breath of Life.

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.

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. She has also been in the headlines presently because of her breast cancer, but now she has been reported to be recovering from that and soon continuing to film last two Harry Potters and Julian Fellowes' film From Time to Time (2009) with Timothy Spall, Anne Reid and Hugh Bonneville.

VITAL STATS

Maggie Smith Information:
Eye color:
Height: 5' 5" (1.65 m)
Nickname(s):
Notable feature(s):
Education: High School for Girls in Oxford and Playhouse School - Oxford, England - drama - 1951-1953
Family:
FATHER: Nathaniel Smith. Pathologist. Worked at Oxford University.

MOTHER: Margaret Hutton Little. Scottish.

BROTHER: Ian Smith. Born on December 8, 1928; twin of Alistair.

BROTHER: Alistair Smith. Born on December 8, 1928; twin of Ian.

SON: Chris Larkin. Actor. Born on June 19, 1967; father, Robert Stephens.

SON: Toby Stephens. Actor. Born on April 21, 1969; father, Robert Stephens.

HUSBAND: Robert Stephens. Actor. Married on June 29, 1967; marriage was troubled by her career success and his alcoholism and bouts of depression; separated in 1974; divorced in February 1975; father of Smith's two sons; died in 1995 at age 64.

HUSBAND: Beverley Cross. Author. Married from June 23, 1975 until his death on March 20, 1998 at age 66; first became romantically involved in the early 1950s; became engaged; separated in the mid-60s when she fell in love with Robert Stephens; re-met in the early 1970s and rekindled relationship.
Resides in:
Religious affiliations:
Political affiliation:
Personal interests/hobbies:
Charities/Causes:
Other: flixster.actor.pane.162652436 - flixster
"The etchings of style in a Maggie Smith performance are unmistakable. First observe the face, with its sharp, art-deco angles, which she tends to stretch into a long rectangle to chart psychic damage, the lines creased as if with a palette knife, the lips pressed taut, elongating the skin between her lips and her nose and lending it a moneyed air. She can alter the shape of her luminous nut-brown eyes to italicize a word or phrase. Her string-bean figure is Modigliani-like in some settings, meager and scarecrow-like in others. In comic roles, her wire-drawn body becomes a mannequin for wondrous costumes, especially hats. Her arms pain the air in broad waves of expressive color, and as she swivels her frame around, usually in counterpoint to her line readings, she does so many witty things with her rubbery wrists that they're almost always the first thing you focus on when she walks onstage or appears on-screen."
--Steve Vineberg for Salon.com, June 7, 2000.

"The most marvellous thing about Maggie is that she can go from comedy to tragedy in one sentence. She's very like me in that she thinks things are disastrous and hilarious in equal measure. We are both very lugubrious, but we both like to have a laugh as well."
--actor Alan Bates quoted in The Daily Telegraph, November 10, 2001.

"She's terribly private, but I would say she's the least aloof person I know. She has a wicked sense of humour. If you have dinner with her, the next day you literally ache from having laughed so much."
--an unidentified friend of the actress' quoted in The Daily Telegraph, February 17, 2002.

"If you live long enough in England, they think you're amazing. What's that thing they say about English actors? `You're too old for the part, you're too young for the part or you're just WONderful because you've survived.' So that's what that's about. It's not about anything else."
--Maggie Smith quoted in The Daily Telegraph, February 17, 2002.
* Is a good friend of Judi Dench.
* Worked with Laurence Olivier in the 1960s at the National Theatre.
* Her father Nathaniel was a Geordie and a pathologist. Her mother Margaret was a Glaswegian and a secretary.
* Her twin brothers Ian and Alistair are six years older then she is. They are both architects.
* Educated at the High School for Girls in Oxford, she started out in the theater as a prompt girl and understudy at the Oxford Repertory. She claims she never went on as no one ever fell ill.* Had to change her stage name to "Maggie Smith" as there already was an actress named "Margaret Smith" at the time she started in the profession.* One of the first people to have a star on the Avenue of Stars - a British version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 7 other Harry Potter actors also have one.
* Has been in three movies that has the word "secret" in it: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Secret Garden, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood.
* Is a patron of the Jane Austen Society.
* Was a good friend of Carry On star Kenneth Williams.
* In 2008, it was reported that she was fighting breast cancer. She has had a tumor removed and undergone chemotherapy.
* Smith has been married twice. She married Robert Stepehens on 29 June 1967 at the Greenwich Register Office and had two sons with him: actors Chris Larkin (born in 1967) and Toby Stephens (born in 1969). They divorced on 6 May 1974. Smith is a grandmother via both her sons. * She married playwright Beverley Cross on 23 August 1975 at the Guildford Register Office, and the marriage ended with his death on 20 March 1998. * She was a close friend of actor Sir Rex Harrison and spoke at his New York memorial service in 1990.* Smith was also close to Laurence Olivier and his wife Joan Plowright. She attendended Olivier's memorial service in 1989.* Smith has suffered from Grave's disease for a number of years.
flixster.actor.pane.162652436 - flixster

Personal Quotes:
  • "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one's still acting."
  • "Jude is the most incredibly level person. Generous, understanding. All the things I'd have to work very hard at, Jude is like that all the time. I would love to be like that. And working with Jude you have to try to remember that you ought to be like that." [on her friend Judi Dench]
  • "I love it, I'm privileged to do it and I don't know where I'd be without it." [on acting]
  • "The performances you have in your head are always much better than the performances on stage."
  • "I still miss him so much it's ridiculous. People say it gets better but it doesn't. It just gets different, that's all. Even in my dream I kept saying to him, 'You are dead. You can't be here.'" [on her second husband Bev]
  • "I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost - it's there and then it's gone."
  • "It's true I don't tolerate fools but then they don't tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that's why I'm quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies."
  • "I longed to be bright and most certainly never was. I was rather hopeless, I suspect."
  • "But there was an incredible nervousness about him. You couldn't do this, couldn't do that. Mustn't ride a bike, you'd be bound to fall off. Couldn't swim, you'd most certainly drown." [on her father]
  • "I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn't really happen. I did Desdemona [at the National, opposite Olivier] with great discomfort and was terrified all the time. But then everyone was terrified of Larry."
  • "My career is chequered. Then I think I got pigeon-holed in humour; Shakespeare is not my thing."
  • "I tend to head for what's amusing because a lot of things aren't happy. But usually you can find a funny side to practically anything."
  • [on roles] "When you get into the granny era, you're lucky to get anything."
flixster.actor.pane.162652436 - flixster

Comments


  • paigehalle
    ur such an amazing actor! add me if u want.
    posted 500 days ago
  • kattekaren
    Professor McGonagall is the coolist thecher in the world!! :D
    posted 643 days ago
  • mewkatie93
    HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!
    posted 693 days ago
  • SammyQ333
    Maggie Smith will forever be one of my favorite actresses... every time I see her in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, her ability to be both comical and emotional blows me away.
    posted 715 days ago
  • trulymadlygazza
    It annoys me that alot of people only know her from Harry Potter. I think I first saw her in Murder By Death, which I have loved ever since. And she is great in all the agatha christie films. I saw her onstage a few years back in 'Talking Heads', that was hilarious. She is a brilliant actor and I hope more people find out about her other films.
    posted 750 days ago
  • kittipatpond
    She is really good in H.P.
    posted 794 days ago
  • DJHCheerleader101
    add me!
    posted 803 days ago
  • polkadot148
    she has that hint of charm and is brilliant in her movies
    i also find it interesting that everyone judges her by her harry potter days and not any of her actual highly respectable movies, but if u watch her in her golden hours you'll see what untapped pure talent she has that doesn't show in the small part of harry potter
    posted 806 days ago
  • iluv24
    yeh she is so kool i love her movies my fav is harry potter i just hope shes in it more
    posted 810 days ago
  • mirrorstormrider
    She is Awesom!!!!!!!!!! Go McGoogles!!!!!!!!
    posted 811 days ago
Maggie Smith at LocateTV.com

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Maggie Smith Trivia


  • In which film did Whoopi Goldberg, Maggie Smith and Kathy Najimy all star in?  Answer »
  • Been in; Hook Sister Act Harry Potter movies  Answer »
  • Which actress starred in Gosford Park, The Harry Potter Series, and Sister Act One and Two??  Answer »
  • Who links these movies? Harry Potter Legally BLonde Sister Act  Answer »

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