50 facts about Maggie Smith: was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire

Maggie Smith is one of only six actresses to win the Academy Award in both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories. Learn 50 interesting things about Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith.

1. Dame Margaret Natalie "Maggie" Smith, CH, DBE made her stage debut in 1952 and has had an extensive, varied career in stage, film and television spanning over sixty years.

2. Smith has appeared in over 50 films.

3. She is one of Britain's most recognisable actresses.

4. She was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in the 1990 New Year Honours for services to the performing arts.

5. She was also appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour (CH) in the 2014 Birthday Honours for services to drama.

6. Smith began her career on stage at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952.

7. For her work on the London stage, she has won a record five Best Actress Evening Standard Awards.

8. In New York, she received Tony Award nominations for Private Lives, Night and Day, and Lettice and Lovage.

9. For Lettice and Lovage she won the 1990 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play.

10. On screen, she first drew praise for the crime film Nowhere to Go, for which she received her first BAFTA Award nomination.

11. Her 1965 film role as Desdemona, in William Shakespeare's Othello, earned her an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe nomination.

12. Smith has won two Academy Awards, winning Best Actress for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Best Supporting Actress for California Suite opposite Michael Caine.

13. She is one of only six actresses to win the Academy Award in both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories.

14. She was nominated for Academy Award a six times.

15. She has also won a record four Best Actress BAFTA Awards. She would add a fifth competitive BAFTA for the 1999 film Tea with Mussolini, this time as Best Supporting Actress.

16. She stars as Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, on Downton Abbey, for which she has won a Golden Globe, two Screen Actors Guild awards and two consecutive Emmy awards.

17. She previously won an Emmy for the 2003 TV film My House in Umbria.

18. Smith has also received several honorary awards, including two more BAFTAs, the Special Award in 1993 and the BAFTA Fellowship in 1996.

19. She also received the Honorary Olivier Award in 2011.

20. Smith is one of the few actresses to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting.

21. In September 2012, she was awarded the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Legacy Award, which she accepted from Christopher Plummer, who presented it to her in a ceremony at the Fairmont Royal York Hotel in Toronto ON, Canada.

22. Smith was born in Romford, Essex, but moved with her family to Oxford when she was four years old.

23. Her father Nathaniel Smith was a Newcastle-born public health pathologist who worked at Oxford University.

24. Her mother Margaret was a Glasgow-born secretary.

25. As a child, Smith's parents used to tell her the romantic story of how they had met on the train from Glasgow to London via Newcastle.

26. She has older twin brothers, Alistair and Ian.

27. She attended Oxford High School until age sixteen, when she left to study acting at the Oxford Playhouse.

28. Smith has been married twice.

29. She married actor Robert Stephens at Greenwich Register Office, ten days after the birth of their first child.

30. The couple had two sons, actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens.

31. The couple divorced on 6 May 1974.

32. Maggie Smith has five grandchildren.

33. She married playwright Beverley Cross on 23 August 1975 at the Guildford Register Office. However Beverley Cross passed away on 20 March 1998.

34. In September 2011, she offered her support for raising the $4.6 million needed to help rebuild the Court Theatre, Christchurch, New Zealand, after the earthquake in 2011 which caused severe damage to the area.

35. In July 2012, she became a patron of the International Glaucoma Association, hoping to support the organization and raise the profile of glaucoma.

36. On 27 November 2012, she contributed a drawing of her own hand to the 2012 Celebrity Paw Auction, to raise funds for Cats Protection.

37. In 1971, Smith was conferred an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) by University of St Andrews.

38. In 1986, she was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of Bath.

39. In 1995, Smith received an honorary Doctor of Letters (DLitt) from the University of Cambridge.

40. She was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Hamburg Alfred Toepfer Foundation in 1991.

41. Smith was made a Fellow of the British Film Institute in recognition of her outstanding contribution to film culture in 1992.

42. She was elected to the American Theatre Hall of Fame in 1994.

43. On February 9, 2014, she was inducted into the Actors Hall of Fame.

44. Smith has a star on the London Avenue of Stars.

45. On April 10, 1999, Smith received the William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre (The Will Award) presented by the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C. in recognition of her significant contribution to classical theatre in America.

46. On September 10, 2012, she was honored with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Legacy Award.

47. Due to the international success of the Harry Potter movies, she is now widely known for playing Professor Minerva McGonagall, opposite Daniel Radcliffe in the title role.

48. She and Radcliffe had worked together previously in the 1999 BBC television adaptation of David Copperfield, in which she played Betsey Trotwood and received a BAFTA TV Award nomination.

49. In a March 2015 interview with Joe Utichi in The Sunday Times, Smith announced that the sixth season of Downton Abbey would be her last.

 Source: Wikipedia.org