What condition did Maggie Smith have?
By TOI Desk Report September 28, 2024 Update on : September 28, 2024
Maggie Smith developed Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder that affects the thyroid gland, in 1988 but recovered from it after radiotherapy and surgery.
Maggie, one of the finest British screen and stage actors of her generation, died on Friday in London. She was 89.
Her family announced the news of her death at a hospital in a statement issued by a publicist.One of Maggie’s early breakthroughs was when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969) – about a teacher at a girls school in the 1930s who dared to have progressive social views and a love life.
It earned her an Academy Award for best actress in 1970.Her second Oscar was in 1979 for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978).
She had won her first Evening Standard Theater Award back in 1962.By the turn of the millennium, Dame Maggie had won two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and numerous nominations.
Even though she earned an extraordinary array of awards, she could still go almost everywhere unrecognized. With the advent of “Downton Abbey”, Smith became an overnight sensation in her mid-70s.“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’” Smith said while talking to Mark Lawson at the BFI and Radio Times Television Festival in 2017. “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
The closest Smith had come to fame was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Prof McGonagall, Hogwarts’ stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films.Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Ilford, a town in Essex which is now part of the borough of Redbridge in London.
Her father, Nathaniel Smith was a public-health pathologist, and her mother, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, was a secretary born in Scotland.When Maggie was five, the family moved to Oxford, where her father taught. After studying at the Oxford School for Girls, she joined the newly formed Oxford Playhouse and made her acting debut in 1952 in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night.”
Maggie Smith is survived by two sons from her first marriage — Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, who are both actors; and five grandchildren, according to the family’s statement.