Maggie Smith

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 whose 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.

NEWS:

DAME MAGGIE SMITH is frightened of accepting another theatre role - because her battle with cancer has left her physically weak and emotionally "flattened".
The veteran actress has starred in more than 50 stage shows in the U.K. and U.S. since the 1950s, even winning a Tony award for her role in 1990 play Lettice and Lovage.
But her fight against breast cancer and chemotherapy treatment last year (08) has left Smith, 74, doubting whether she has the strength to return to the stage.
She says, "It leaves you so flattened. I'm not sure I could go back to theatre work, although film work is more tiring. I'm frightened to work in theatre now. I feel very uncertain. I haven't done it for a while.
"It's one of those things you ought to keep on doing and I haven't for a bit. I would love to be able to, because I do love it, but I feel a great lack of confidence.
"I think it's the age I was when it happened. It knocks you sideways. It takes you longer to recover, you are not so resilient. I am fearful of the amount of energy one needs to be in a film or a play."
Smith -who is something of a national treasure in Britain - described how she managed to go ahead with filming of "Harry Potter and The Half-Blood Prince," in which she again plays Professor Minerva McGonagall. "I was hairless. I had no problem getting the wig on. I was like a boiled egg," she said, adding that chemotherapy made her feel "horribly sick. I was holding on to railings, thinking I can't do this'." She said she plans to "stagger through" filming of the final Harry Potter film, "The Deathly Hallows," hoping to put her cancer battle behind her. "The last couple of years have been a write-off, though I'm beginning to feel like a person now," she said. "My energy is coming back. Shit happens. I ought to pull myself together a bit."

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