Oscar, Emmy and Tony-winning actor Maggie Smith played everything from wistful inventions in Shakespeare to Harry Potter’s Prof. McGonagall and the Dowager Countess Downton Abbey. She died on Friday at the age of 89.

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and crossed stage and screen – has died aged 89. She died peacefully Friday morning surrounded by family and friends, her publicist confirmed.

Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would have dared to try.

Although she had a good countenance and stood barely five feet tall, casting directors realized early on that her characters would inevitably appear unyielding, whether she was full of swear words in Shaw, casting spells like Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing the opposition with sideways glances like Downton Abbey‘s formidable Lady Violet.

Act One: Accurate diction in its prime

What Maggie Smith learned about captivating audiences was something she learned early. She reached the professional stage in her teens and quickly graduated to Britain’s National Theatre, West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for conveying the barbs of Restoration comedy and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the kind of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The millionaire, and it was sometimes difficult for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.

Almost as non-stop was the title role that won her an Oscar for Best Actress in 1970: her misguided teacher at a Scottish girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

“Give me a gerll at an impressionable age,” she purred, “and she’s mine for life.”

The character was in fact not in her prime, but Smith certainly was. Over the next eight years she starred in six films, including Traveling with my aunt And Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice Unpleasant The Carol Burnett Showand on stage, held title roles of Hedda Gabler Unpleasant Peter Pan.

Maggie Smith in February 1969.

Roy Jones/Hulton Archives/Getty Images

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Roy Jones/Hulton Archives/Getty Images

All this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California suitefor playing several characters, including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who at one point gives a delightfully self-deprecating acceptance speech in which she says she “doesn’t want to sob about Burt Reynolds.”

No sobs in Smith’s actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.

Act Two: Best exotic roles, some written especially for her

All of this took place well before a kind of second act in Smith’s career, in which she served as a chaperone in the A room with a viewespecially comical as the Mother Superior Sister Act with Whoopi Goldberg, Grumpy The best exotic marigold hotel movies, even grumpier than the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway The lady in the vanand downright viper-like as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Even though he had spent most of the film slaughtering all the visitors at that point, there was so much venom in her statement that he was “proud, subtle, cunning and bloody” that McKellen seemed shocked. He could too.

Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus And Equusrecalled that he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and lovage especially for her, about an extravagant, imaginative guide “to celebrate her cheerfulness and glitter and perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And above all, humor: her presence is witty.”

Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton

And then Smith’s career – for which she was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and later Dame and Member of the Order of the Companions of Honor – entered a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she had known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one).

Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham Downton Abbey.

Nick Briggs/PBS

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Nick Briggs/PBS

And as she cast spells on children, their parents and grandparents waited for each pronouncement on TV. Downton Abbeywhere for six seasons she brought a volatile sense of humor to the kind of woman she never was in real life – aloof, entitled, undiplomatic, impatient, argumentative, petty and so thoroughly winning that audiences couldn’t get enough from her.

At least that’s what Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences longing for more of her presence for seventy years, though she worked so consistently that the Dowager Countess’s most famous question, “what is a weekend?” – could almost have been her own.