A statement from her sons Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin to the BBC said on Friday: “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27 September. An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”

Best known in recent years for matriarchal roles in seven of the Harry Potter films and the ITV-PBS series Downton Abbey, Smith earned early acclaim with the Best Actress Oscar in 1970 for portraying the titular schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).

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She was also nominated for four other Oscars — for her work as best actress in Travels With My Aunt (1972) and for supporting turns in Othello (1965), A Room With a View (1985) and Gosford Park (2001).

In a career that flourished well into her 80s, Smith played the stern yet compassionate Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series and the irascible Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey.

Known for her privileged sensibilities (“What is a weekend?”) and zingers (“You’re a woman with a brain and reasonable ability. Stop whining and find something to do.”), Violet won Smith three best supporting actress Emmys, though she publicly admitted that she had never watched the series, even after it ended. “There came a point when it was too late to catch up,” she joked.

She won a best actress Tony Award in 1990 for her performance in the comedy Lettice and Lovage.

She discovered the essence of her characters and channeled it through her own performing powers. “The boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is always poised,” said director Alan Bennett, who worked with Smith on the 2015 comedy The Lady in the Van.

She often delivered inspired performances in comedies, including in Murder by Death (1976) as Dora, the high-society wife of David Niven’s detective Dick Charleston. She was amusing as the humorless Mother Superior in Sister Act (1992) and its sequel the following year; endearing opposite Robin Williams as Granny Wendy in Hook (1991); and droll as a cantankerous retiree visiting India in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).

“I’d been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey, and life was fine — nobody knew who the hell I was,” Smith joked at the 2017 BFI TV festival, blaming TV for stardom that increasingly affected her ability to go out in public.

Of the show’s completion after six seasons, she told The Telegraph, “It was right to stop. It was one of those odd things — nobody knew it was going to go careering on as long as it did, and it was jolly exhausting.”

In addition to her Emmys for Downton Abbey, Smith won outstanding lead actress in 2003 for the drama My House in Umbria, playing a romance novelist who opens up her home to three survivors of terrorist attack.

The actress, like several of her beloved characters, had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Said Richard Eyre, who directed her in Suddenly Last Summer (1993), “She doesn’t indulge foolishness, and that is regardless of rank. You have to tread carefully, because if you say something ill-thought or ill-expressed, she will not let it go. It’s a fantastic discipline, because it obliges you to be very clear in your thinking.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, a lower-middle-class area of Essex, England. She was the youngest of three — her twin brothers Ian and Alistair, six years older, both became architects — and her father was a medical laboratory technician. She studied at the Oxford Playhouse School, making her stage debut in 1952 and working in the thriving revue scene there.

She moved to America and performed in her first film, Nowhere to Go, in 1958, then appeared in The V.I.P.s (1963), an airport-set drama that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Her stirring performance as Desdemona in Laurence Olivier’s 1965 movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello won Smith her first Oscar nomination. Four years later came her Oscar-winning portrayal of an idiosyncratic English schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (Fittingly, that film was directed by Ronald Neame, whose grandson, Gareth Neame, was an executive producer on Downton.)

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She also distinguished herself in the Hercule Poirot whodunits Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). During the ’80s, Smith demonstrated her comedic agility: She starred opposite Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin in The Missionary (1982) and was uproarious as a snooty society woman in A Private Function (1984).

Her other movie credits include Oh! What A Lovely War (1969), where she played a music hall star; Quartet (1981), as a famous retired opera singer; The Secret Garden (1993), as head housekeeper Mrs. Medlock; The First Wives Club (1996), as a wealthy New York City socialite; and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), as Caro, one of the original Ya-Yas.

Her performances on television were equally auspicious. In addition to her Emmy-winning turns for Downton and My House in Umbria, Smith was nominated for her roles as Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer; as Mary Gilbert in 2010’s Capturing Mary; and as Betsey Trotwood in the 1999 BBC miniseries David Copperfield oppositeDaniel Radcliffe, who credited Smith with getting him cast as Harry Potter.

Smith was married to playwright Beverley Cross from 1975 until his death in 1998. She earlier was married to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes star Robert Stephens — also her co-star in Miss Jean Brodie — and had two sons with him: actors Chris Larkin (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) and Toby Stephens (Die Another Day).