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 Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise 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
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 (played by Helena 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
Before she was the Transfiguration professor at Hogwarts, Smith was Mother Superior in Sister Act and Sister Act 2, which gave us the perfect line, “Go with god, Crispy.”
The Secret Garden
Maggie Smith played lots of lovably stern, upper-crust guardians in her time, but ’90s kids may remember when she was the less-than-lovable stern, upper-crust guardian Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden.
The First Wives Club
In 1996, Smith played a grand dame of The First Wives Club, a wealthy socialite who helps her younger counterparts get back at their ex-husbands.
Harry Potter
Who could forget every Gryffindor’s favorite teacher, Professor McGonagall? “Why is it, when something happens, it is always you three?”
Gosford Park
Smith earned another Oscar nomination for her turns as the Dowager Countess of Trentham in Gosford Park, nearly one decade before she became another feisty dowager countess at a different fictional English estate.
The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
For once, Smith wasn’t playing a member of the aristocracy. In The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and its sequel, The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, she’s simply a retired housekeeper looking for a cheap hip operation.
Downton Abbey
It would be impossible to narrow down Smith’s most iconic moments as the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley, for which she won three Emmy Awards. But if we had to choose, we’d go with, “What is a week-end?”
This story originally appeared in Glamour.
