LONDON, Sept 28 — Britain's Maggie Smith, the double Oscar-winner who shone on stage and screen for more than seven decades, has died in hospital in London, her sons announced yesterday, prompting a flood of tributes. “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith,” Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said in a statement. “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning.
” Over the course of her career, Smith won a Tony, two Oscars, three Golden Globes and five Baftas. And she achieved late-career international fame for her depiction of the acerbic Dowager Countess of Grantham Violet Crawley in the hit television series Downton Abbey . Britain's King Charles III called her “a national treasure" who was admired around the world.
Paying tribute to her “warmth and wit that shone through both on and off the stage”, he posted a photograph of him sharing a joke with the actor. Prime Minister Keir Starmer also called her a “true national treasure” while the Bafta TV and film academy saluted “a legend of British stage and screen”. Born in 1934 in Oxford in central England, the daughter of an Oxford professor of pathology, Smith made her stage debut in 1952 with the Oxford University Dramatic Society.
She won a best actress Oscar for the 1969 drama The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie based on Muriel Spark's novel, and best supporting actress for her role in the 1978 Neil Simon comedy California Suite . “An intensely private person,.