Fangirl Friday - Dame Maggie Smith

By Brooke

Dame Maggie Smith is a champion of theater, film and comedy. The British Lady is turning 80 this year, and she is still rocking our socks off with her grace, talent and bone-dry wit.

Maggie Smith’s career on the stage goes back to the 1950s, and she won two Academy Awards and her first Golden Globe Award before many of us were born. As children of the 80s, we fell in love with her in some our childhood classics - Clash of the Titans, Hook, The Secret Garden and Sister Act.

To the younger audiences, Maggie Smith is most recognized as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies. The no-nonsense Professor is one of the most beloved characters of the series. Who else shed a tear of joy when she jumped in and faced Snape, one-on-one, and sent that whippersnapper flying through the window?

No doubt, Maggie Smith’s most famous characters are strong women, and so is the actress herself. Did you know that during the filming of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, she was undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer? At the time, she questioned whether she would be able to go back to the theater, and expressed how difficult making further movies would be for her.

Yet the formidable Dame fought her way through the final Harry Potter movies and went on to portray the most standout role (in our opinion) of the Downton Abbey series, the Dowager Countess of Grantham.

Don’t mess with the Countess. Her zingers are so devilish that someone has devoted a Facebook page to them. 

“It’s true, I don’t tolerate fools. But then, they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

We heart Maggie Smith!

Sources:
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0001749/
The Telegraph, Oct 5 2009: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/harry-potter/6260564/Dame-Maggie-Smith-reveals-Harry-Potter-breast-cancer-treatment-struggle.html