Flinty, eccentric British actress Maggie Smith, 89, died on Sept. 27 (did anyone else think she was older than that?). She was already a stage star when she made her first film splashes in Othello (1965) and as the hugely misguided schoolmarm in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969, her first of two Oscar wins). Smith never slowed down (Travels with My Aunt, Death on the Nile, Murder by Death, California Suite—another Oscar—A Room with a View, Tea with Mussolini, Gosford Park, Quartet, several Harry Potters); she had a late-life triumph doing a Lady Bracknell turn on Downton Abbey. Smith stayed active onstage, in the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, on the West End and on Broadway (New Faces of 1956, Private Lives). She was married to actor Robert Stephens (her Jean Brodie costar) and playwright Beverley Cross. Smith in real life was a great deal like many of the characters she played: "I don’t tolerate fools and they don’t tolerate me,” she said in 2014. “You’re trying to say that I’m – what everybody says, they always seem to think that I’m scary . . . And I have to face it. I am old and I am scary. And I’m very sorry about it but I don’t know what you do.”
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