Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, announced that she passed away early Friday in a hospital in London.

“They leave behind two sons and five beloved grandchildren who are heartbroken by the loss of their remarkable mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement from publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was often considered the top British actress of her generation, which included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. She received several Academy Award nominations and won many acting awards.

Even in her later years, she was still sought after, though she once joked that “once you reach the grandma stage, you’re lucky to get any roles.”

Smith humorously described her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. When asked why she accepted the role, she joked, “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed her in a TV version of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with. You really have to be quick to outsmart Maggie Smith.”

In “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” where she played a captivating but dangerous schoolteacher from Edinburgh, Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress and a BAFTA in 1969.

She also earned a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, along with Golden Globes for both “California Suite” and “A Room with a View.” Additionally, she won BAFTAs for Best Actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She was nominated for Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View,” and “Gosford Park.” She also won a BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she earned a Tony Award in 1990 for her role in “Lettice and Lovage.”

In 2012, her work earned her three Golden Globe nominations for the hit TV series “Downton Abbey” and the films “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Quartet.”

Smith was known for being challenging to work with at times and sometimes overshadowing her co-stars.

Richard Burton noted that in “The VIPs,” Smith didn’t just take over a scene—she “commits grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall said she wasn’t “remotely difficult” unless she was working with less capable people. He explained that she is very tough on herself and expects the same from others.

Smith admitted that she could be impatient at times.

“It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, and they don’t tolerate me, so I can be a bit spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m good at playing prickly elderly ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can make even a simple line like ‘Have you no marmalade?’ sound like a clever saying from Coward or Wilde.”

Smith famously got laughs from the simple line, “This haddock is disgusting,” in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

“But unfortunately, the critics mentioned it, and after that, it never got a laugh,” she recalled. “Once something is labeled funny, it’s fragile. It disappears.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life simply: “I went to school, wanted to act, started acting, and I’m still acting.”

Her father was assigned to wartime duty in Oxford in 1939, where her studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things around the universities there. If you were clever and quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep since all the colleges were putting on different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She chose “Maggie” as her stage name because there was already another Margaret Smith in the theater.

Laurence Olivier recognized her talent and invited her to join his original National Theatre company, casting her as his co-star in the 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”

Smith mentioned that two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, were significant influences on her work in National Theatre productions.

Alan Bennett, who was preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” was cautious about Smith’s reputation for getting bored. Actor Jeremy Brett described it as, “she starts wonderfully and then fades, like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we only had just enough time to do it was a real blessing because she was so fresh and engaged,” said Bennett, who also wrote a leading role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van.”

Despite her larger-than-life presence on stage and screen, Smith was known to be very private.

Simon Callow, who acted with her in “A Room with a View,” said he messed up their first meeting by showering her with compliments.

“I blurted out all sorts of nonsense about her, and she kind of withdrew. She really doesn’t like that kind of attention,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to discuss acting because she was afraid that if she did, it would disappear.”

Smith was honored as a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of being knighted, in 1990.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967, and they had two sons, Christopher and Toby, before divorcing in 1975. That same year, she married writer Beverley Cross, who passed away in 1998.

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