Maggie Smith
Dame Margaret Natalie Smith CH DBE is an English actress. She made her professional debut on Broadway in New Faces of ’56. Smith has appeared in more than 60 films and over 70 plays. She was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 for contributions to the performing arts.
About Maggie Smith in brief
Dame Margaret Natalie Smith CH DBE is an English actress. She has had an extensive career on stage, film, and television, which began in the mid-1950s. Smith has appeared in more than 60 films and over 70 plays, and is one of Britain’s most recognisable actresses. She was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990 for contributions to the performing arts, and a Companion of Honour in 2014 for services to drama. Smith made her professional debut on Broadway in New Faces of ’56. For her work on the London stage, she has won a record six Best Actress Evening Standard Awards for The Private Ear and The Public Eye. She received Tony Award nominations for Private Lives and Night and Day, before winning the 1990 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage. She appeared in Stratford Shakespeare Festival productions of Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth, and West End productions of A Delicate Balance and The Breath of Life. She won an Emmy Award in 2003 for My House in Umbria, to become one of the few actresses to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, and starred as Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, on Downton Abbey. Smith played Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series. Her other films include Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Death on the Nile, Clash of the Titans, Evil Under the Sun, Hook, Sister Act and The Lady in the Van. She became a fixture at the Royal National Theatre in the 1960s, most notably for playing Desdemona in Othello opposite Laurence Olivier and earning her first Oscar nomination for her performance in the film version of the play.
She also starred in the musical Share My Luce, written by Bamber Gascoigne and directed by Kenneth Williams. In 1959, she received the first of a record 18 BAFTA Film and TV nominations for her role in Nowhere to Go. In 1962, Smith won the first six Best Evening Standard Actress Awards for her roles in Peter Shaffer’s The Public Ear and Public Eye, again opposite Kenneth Williams, and again in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. In the same year, she made her Broadway debut playing several roles in the review New Faces Of ’56, at thethelthelthelmore Theatre from June to December 1956. She made her stage debut in Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952, aged 17, under the auspices of the Oxford University Dramatic Society. In 1954, she appeared in the television programme Oxford Accents produced by Ned Sherrin. Smith appeared in her first film in 1956, in an uncredited role in Child in the House, and her first Broadway debut in 1957, in a musical comedy, opposite Ethel Barrymore. In 1956, she starred opposite Barrymore in Share my Luce. In 1960, she won her first BAFTA and TV nomination for the film Nowhere To Go, and received her first nomination for a British Academy of Film and Television Arts award.
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This page is based on the article Maggie Smith published in Wikipedia (as of Jan. 02, 2021) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
