Maggie Smith, the two-time Oscar-winning actor best known for her roles as the stern Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” film franchise and the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” died Friday, her publicist and children confirmed.

She was 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, paid tribute to their mother in a joint statement. “It is with great sadness that we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away early this morning in hospital,” they wrote.

“She was with friends and family at the end. She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren devastated by the loss of their special mother and grandmother,” Larkin and Stephens wrote. They did not immediately provide a cause of death.

In a career spanning nearly seven decades, Smith has established herself as one of the most distinguished and beloved British actors of her generation, revered for her witty storylines and poise.

She was often honored by her colleagues. She won Academy Awards for her performances in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969) and “California Suite” (1978). She earned four Emmy Awards, including three for her role as Violet Crawley in “Downton.”

She received Tony nominations for her performances in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives” and Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” before winning the Best Actress award for “Lettice and Lovage” in 1990 – the same year she was made a Dame by Queen Elizabeth II was appointed.

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934 in the town of Ilford in East London. She studied acting at the Oxford Playhouse School and made her professional acting debut in a production of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” in 1952.

She quickly proved herself to be a prolific performer in theater productions in both Britain and the US. She appeared in the London revue ‘Share My Lettuce’, made her Broadway debut in ‘New Faces of ’56’ and regularly appeared in plays at London’s famous Old Vic theatre.

Laurence Olivier recognized her natural talent and recruited her to join the opening company of Britain’s National Theater in 1963. The following year, Smith played Desdemona in Olivier’s ‘Othello’. Two years later, Smith reprized her role in Olivier’s film adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy and received her first Oscar nomination.

Smith introduced himself to a wider audience as the eponymous character in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”, directed by Ronald Neame. She portrayed an uninhibited, intellectually adventurous teacher at a girls’ school in Edinburgh, Scotland, who orders her to ignore the curriculum.

New York Times film critic Vincent Canby praised her for expressing “a dizzying amalgam of contrasting moods, shifts in vocal levels, and obliquely expressed emotions, all of which are spot on.”

“Jean Brodie” marked the beginning of a long period in which Smith alternated between high-profile appearances in live theater and an eclectic range of film roles. She appeared in mystery films such as ‘Murder by Death’, ‘Death on the Nile’ and ‘Evil Under the Sun’.

Smith won her second Oscar for her supporting role in “California Suite,” an adaptation of a Neil Simon play about the private lives of guests at a luxury hotel in Los Angeles. Smith portrayed a celebrated British actor who reckoned with her complex marriage to a gay man, played by Michael Caine.

Smith was nominated for a total of six Oscars, including for her work in the 1972 comedy “Travels With My Aunt,” the 1985 Merchant-Ivory drama “A Room With a View” and the ensemble mystery “Gosford Park” from 2001. She has also been regularly recognized by the British Academy Film Awards, the Golden Globes and the Screen Actors Guild Awards.

She reached perhaps the height of her international fame when she was cast in the big-screen versions of JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series as Professor Minerva McGonagall, the steely and sharp-witted Hogwarts professor who keeps an eye on ‘The Boy Who’. Lived.”

When British newspaper The Telegraph asked Smith why she took the role, she joked: “Harry Potter is my retirement.” In other interviews, she suggested that playing McGonagall in seven of the franchise’s eight entries was not creatively satisfying, although she appreciated being involved in projects that excited her young grandchildren.

Smith further cemented her celebrity with “Downton Abbey,” in which she played the mother of an aristocratic earl, a stubborn and fiercely judgmental widow whose worldview has not evolved beyond the Victorian era. She played the Dowager Countess for all six seasons of the show and two films. (The films were distributed by Focus Features, a division of NBCUniversal, the parent company of NBC News.)

In an interview at a film and radio festival in Britain in 2017, Smith joked that she had been “living a completely normal life” until the producers of “Downton Abbey” came knocking on her door. “No one knew who I was,” she said. But with the series’ worldwide success and three Emmys, that all changed.

She has stayed busy in recent years, appearing in films such as ‘The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel’, ‘Quartet’ and ‘The Lady in the Van’. Her most recent film appearance was in ‘The Miracle Club’, which was released in Britain last year

Smith is survived by two sons and five grandchildren.