Maggie Smith - Biography

Last Editor: yochica				Maggie Smith Biography -   Name : Maggie Smith Birth name : Margaret Natalie Smith Date of birth : December 28, 1934 Place of birth : Ilford Borough, Essex, England Profession : Actor Height : 5' 5" (1.65 m) Spouse(s) : Robert Stephens (1967-1974, divorced) Beverley Cross (1975-1998, widowed) Notable roles : Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series

Maggie Smith Trivia -

She is mother of actor Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. Director Agnieszka Holland admired Maggie Smith for years before making The Secret Garden (1993). She knew of Smith's talents and immediately offered her the role of Mrs. Medlock. She was appointed a CBE in 1970 and a DBE (Dame Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 1990. She created an honorary D.Litt of the Universities of St Andrews and Cambridge in 1971 and 1995 respectively. She ranked tenth in the 2001 Orange Film Survey of greatest British film actresses. She is mother-in-law of actress Anna-Louise Plowman. She was nominated for a Laurence Olivier Theatre Award in 2000 (1999 season) for Best Actress for her performance in The Lady in The Van at the Queen's Theatre. She was nominated for a 1998 Laurence Olivier Theatre Award for Best Actress of the 1997 season for her performance in A Delicate Balance at the Haymarket Theatre. She was awarded the 1984 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for her performance in The Way of the World. She was awarded the 1981 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for her performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was awarded the 1994 London Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Actress for her performance in Three Tall Women. She was portrayed by Ian McKellen on Saturday Night Live. In 2003, she became the seventeenth performer to win the Triple Crown of acting. Oscars: Best Actress, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie' (1969) & Best Supporting Actress, 'California Suite' (1978), Tony: Best Actress-Play, 'Lettice and Lovage' (1990), and Emmy: Best Actress-Miniseries/Movie, 'My House in Umbria' (2003). She is a good friend of Judi Dench. She worked with Laurence Olivier in the 1960s at the National Theatre. Her father Nathaniel was a Geordie and a pathologist. Her mother Margaret was a Glaswegian and a secretary. Her twin brothers Ian and Alistair are six years older then she is. They are both architects. She won Broadway's 1990 Tony Award as Best Actress (Play) for "Lettice and Lovage." She was also nominated twice before in the same category: for a revival of Noel Coward's "Private Lives" in 1975, and for "Night and Day" in 1980. She educated at the High School for Girls in Oxford, she started out in the theater as a prompt girl and understudy at the Oxford Repertory. She claims she never went on as no one ever fell ill. She made her stage debut with the Oxford University Dramatic Society as Viola in Shakespare's "Twelfth Night." Bird-dogged by an American theatrical impresario, the part led to her being cast in her Broadway debut in "New Faces of 1956." She had to change her stage name to "Maggie Smith" as there already was an actress named "Margaret Smith" at the time she started in the profession. She appeared with Olivier in "Rhinoceros" in the English Stage Company's 1960 London production. Olivier pronounced her acting "Marvelous." She was a member of the Old Vic Company from 1959 to 1963, when the company was dissolved. It served as the basis for the new National Theatre being organized by Sir Laurence Olivier, whom invited Maggie to join. She gave a memorable performance as Desdemona opposite Olivier's Othello at The National Theatre's temporary home at the Old Vic theater building in 1964. Repeating the performance in the 1965 film made of that production, she won a Best Supporting Actress Academy Award nomination, her first of six Oscar nods. She is one of only a few actresses to win a Best Supporting Actress Oscar after winning a Best Actress Oscar. While filming Death on the Nile (1978), aboard ship, no one was allowed his or her own dressing room, so she shared a dressing room with Bette Davis & Angela Lansbury. She was the first of 4 consecutive winners of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar to have the initials 'M.S.', the others being: Meryl Streep - Kramer vs. Kramer (1979), Mary Steenburgen - Melvin and Howard (1980), and Maureen Stapleton - Reds (1981). She is a vice-president of Chichester Cinema at New Park. Anita Roddick and Kenneth Branagh are also vice-presidents. She was one of the first people to have a star on the Avenue of Stars - a British version of the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 7 other Harry Potter actors also have one She and her first husband, Robert Stephens, appeared together in Much Ado About Nothing. In 1993, Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, who were also married at the time, played the same roles. Smith later worked with both Branagh and Thompson in the Harry Potter films. Has been in three movies that has the word "secret" in it: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, The Secret Garden, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. She was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of her outstanding contribution to film culture. She is a patron of the Jane Austen Society. She has played fictional fascists twice: first Jean Brodie in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and then Lady Hester Random in Tea with Mussolini (1999). She was a good friend of Carry On star Kenneth Williams. In 2008, it was reported that she was fighting breast cancer. She has had a tumor removed and undergone chemotherapy. At Oscars in 2002 Whoopi Goldberg introduced her, Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith as "The Smith Family".

Maggie Smith Detailed Biography -

Dame Margaret Natalie Smith, DBE was born on December 28, 1934. She is better known as Dame Maggie Smith, is a two-time Academy Award, and Emmy-winning English film, stage, and television actress. Smith was born in Ilford in Essex, the daughter of Nathaniel Smith, a Newcastle-born public health pathologist who worked at Oxford University, and Margaret Hutton Little, who was Scottish. She has two older twin brothers, Alistair and Ian. Smith studied at Oxford High School although she has been quoted as having not enjoyed the experience, at a time when the likes of Lady Antonia Fraser would have been amongst her peers. Smith has had an extensive career on both screen and in live theatre and is known as one of Britain's pre-eminent actresses. She started her career at the Oxford Playhouse with Frank Shelley, and made her first film in 1956. She became a fixture at the Royal National Theatre in the 1960s, most notably for playing Desdemona in Othello opposite Laurence Olivier, and winning her first Oscar nomination when she immortalized her performance in the 1965 film version. In 1969 she won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance as an unorthodox Scottish schoolteacher in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a role originally created on stage by Vanessa Redgrave in 1966. She was also awarded the 1978 Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role as the brittle actress, Diana Barrie, in California Suite acting opposite Michael Caine. Afterwards, Caine is supposed to have humorously telephoned Michael Palin on hearing that Palin was about to embark on a film (The Missionary) with Smith, warning him she would steal the film . Smith appeared in Sister Act in 1992, and had a major role in the 1999 film Tea With Mussolini where she appeared as the formidable Lady Hester. Indeed, many of her more mature roles have centred on what Smith self-mockingly refers to as her "gallery of grotesques", and indeed both her directors and her audiences love to see her playing waspish, sarcastic or plain rude characters; it is to her credit that she bestows such unsympathetic roles with a humanity and vulnerability which lesser actors could not. Recent examples of this would include the judgemental sister in Ladies in Lavender and the cantankerous snob in Gosford Park for which she received yet another Oscar nomination. Other notable roles include the querulous Charlotte Bartlett in the Merchant-Ivory production of A Room with a View and a vivid supporting turn as the aged Duchess of York in Ian McKellen's film of Richard III. Given the international success of the Harry Potter movies, she is widely known in the role of Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films. She is due to appear in Harry Potter and The Order of the Phoenix in July 2007. 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. Off stage, however, she is sometimes perceived as a reserved and private person. To her legion of devoted and sometimes fanatical admirers, however, she is one of the great actresses of film and theatre with an idiosyncratic style quite unlike anyone else; it was during the 1970s that she moved to Canada to find a new direction in both her art and in her personal life as she had recently become divorced. On stage, her many roles include the title character in the stage production of Alan Bennett's Lady in the Van and starring as Peter Pan[citation needed] in J. M. Barrie's fairytale story Peter Pan. She later played Wendy in the Peter Pan adaption Hook. 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 awarded Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1970, and was raised to Dame Commander (DBE) in 1990. Smith has been married twice. She married Robert Stephens on 29 June 1967, at the Greenwich Registry office and had two sons with him: actors Chris Larkin (born 1967) and Toby Stephens (born 1969). They divorced on 6 May 1974. She married Beverly Cross (on 23 August 1975 at Guildford Registry Office) and the marriage ended with his death on 20 March 1998. At the time of his death she was appearing in A Delicate Balance at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket yet with characteristic fortitude she continued to the end of the run.[citation needed] She has been nominated twice for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role, winning it once: She has been nominated four times for the Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role, winning it once: Smith has won the BAFTA Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role four times: