For most people born in the last three decades, became a familiar figure as Minerva McGonagall, the transfiguration professor and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry in the movies. That strict but kind sorceress dispensed both imperious commands and compassionate counsel in a clipped Scottish brogue from beneath her pointed black hat. Others might have met her as Violet Crawley, the tart-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham in , whose advanced age and creeping infirmity did nothing to diminish her Old World authority — “I wouldn’t know, I’m not familiar with the sensation,” she once remarked, on the foreign concept of being wrong — or her precision at landing a cutting put-down.
Smith , aged 89, and those who know her only from those two signature roles would do well to sample the many jewels elsewhere in her seven-decade filmography. For many of us who had savored Smith’s priceless delivery of the driest witticisms and most delicious bon mots for years, the wider 21st century discovery of her formidable screen persona via those characters brought satisfaction that the youngsters had finally caught up. Smith had already made an impression in the 1960s with roles in , and the film version of the National Theatre’s , starring opposite Laurence Olivier and landing her first Oscar nomination as Desdemona.
But it was the 1969 release of , which won her the Academy Award for Best Actress, that really put her on the map. That title role .