It’s difficult to think of an actor more universally beloved than Dame Maggie Smith, whose death at age 89 was reported on September 27.
“It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end,” said her sons, Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, in a statement, per Variety. “She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother. We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days.”
Whether you remember her best as Helena Bonham-Carter’s stuffy guardian in A Room With a View or as the Crawley family’s sassy matriarch in Downton Abbey, Smith’s decades-long career included dozens of iconic roles in nearly a hundred films and television series.
Here are just a few of our favorites.
A Room With a View
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Smith earned her fourth Oscar nomination for 1985’s A Room With a View, in which she plays Charlotte Bartlett, an older woman chaperoning the young Lucy Honeychurch (Bonham-Carter) on a trip to Italy in the early 1900s. The film begins with Charlotte complaining about their rooms, which do not have the view they were promised.
Sister Act
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