Maggie Smith

Born: December 1934
Where: Ilford, Essex, UK

One of the most revered actresses on both sides of the Atlantic, Smith has created a gallery of characters who run the gamut from repressed spinsters to comical eccentrics.

Popular hightlights include Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series and Mother Superior in Sister Act.

However, she has also impressed with Oscar-winning turns in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and the comedy California Suite.

She was also nominated for her performances in Gosford Park, A Room With A View, Travels With My Aunt and 1965's Othello.

She made her acting debut in a 1952 production of Twelfth Night at Oxford Playhouse and four years later she was improbably dancing on the broadway stage in New Faces of 56.

She made her screen debut in 1959 in Nowhere To Go and then returned to work on the London stage with Laurence Olivier and Richard Burton.

In 1969, Smith and her real-life partner Robert Stephens co-starred as illicit lovers in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, role where her neurotic and fascistic Scottish schoolteacher astounded audiences and led to a Best Actress Oscar.

Smith was back in 1972 starring as the oddball relative sojourning across Europe in Travels With My Aunt, a performance that netted her a Best Actress Oscar nomination.

Other films included the Neil Simon spoof Murder By Death or the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile and then Simon provided her with one of her richest roles in his California Suite.

Smith proved a hilarious foil for Michael Palin in two comedies, The Missionary and A Private Function.

As the repressed chaperone who lives vicariously through her charge in the Merchant Ivory production A Room with a View the actress excelled.

In 1987 she had one of her best dramatic roles on film as the repressed spinster who blossoms when she finds romance with a con man in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.

For much of the rest of the decade, her on screen personae tended to dour, elderly types, such as the tart Mother Superior in Sister Act.

Director Agnieszka Holland tapped into similar qualities casting Smith as the no-nonsense housekeeper Mrs. Medlock in The Secret Garden and as the meddlesome aunt in Washington Square.

Smith was impressive as a grande dame in Italy whose misguided admiration for Benito Mussolini recalled Jean Brodie's admiration of Franco in Tea with Mussolini.

As the new millennium dawned, Smith brought a poignant sense of loss to her turn as a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in the elegiac The Last September and went onto play shape-shifting Professor Minerva McGonagle in the Harry Potter series.

She also earned nearly unanimous praise for her scene-stealing portrayal of the tart-tongued, imperious Countess of Trentham in the Robert Altman-directed Gosford Park.

Smith featured Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood before embarking on her first on stage teaming with Judi Dench in David Hare's The Breath of Life.

Recent work includes actor Charles Dance's directorial debut Ladies in Lavender alongside Dame Judi Dench, as well as the fourth Potter movie, Harry Potter & The Goblet Of Fire.