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Dame Maggie Smith, who died on Friday aged 89, was a perfectionist who turned anxiety into an art form and was hailed as one of the great actors of stage and screen.

One of the few actors to win the treble of an Oscar (twice), Emmy (four times), and Tony, Smith moved effortlessly between performing Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde on stage to the Harry Potter movie franchise and the hit television series Downton Abbey. But soul-searching about her art was anathema to the British actor, who jealously guarded her privacy and spurned the trappings of stardom.

“I wish I could just go into Harrods and order a personality,” she once said. “It would make life so much easier.” Perhaps her concern about her perceived lack of personality was what spurred her to take on so many others.

Her first Academy Award nomination was for her turn playing Desdemona opposite Laurence Olivier’s Othello in 1965, before she won her first Oscar for her role as an Edinburgh schoolmistress in 1969’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Her second was for her supporting role in the 1978 comedy California Suite, where she acted alongside Michael Caine.

Other critically acclaimed roles included Lady Bracknell in Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest on the West End stage, a 92-year-old bitterly fighting senility in Edward Albee’s play Three Tall Women, and her part in the 2001 black comedy movie Gosford Park.

In the 21st century, she was best known as Professor McGonagall in all seven Harry Potter movies, and the Dowager Countess in the hit TV series and movie spin-offs of Downton Abbey, a role that seemed tailor-made for an actor known for purse-lipped asides and malicious cracks.

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, in Essex, northeast of London. She moved to Oxford as a small child when her father, a pathologist, took a role at the university, and she began acting in the local theatre at 17.

Her big break came in 1956 with New Faces on Broadway. Her 1958 part in the British crime movie Nowhere to Go earned her a BAFTA nomination.

The following years were to see a welter of acclaimed roles in movies (including Travels with my Aunt, A Room with a View and The Secret Garden), on stage (Lettice and Lovage, Virginia) and on television (David Copperfield, My House in Umbria).

Critic Irving Wardle hailed a mouth that contracted from a wide, inviting smile to the “sucked-in venom of a stoat at bay” — something she put to good use in Downton Abbey For many viewers, her waspish turn in the smash-hit historical series that ran on television from 2010 to 2015 was the best reason to watch it, and it earned her multiple awards - although it did little for her desire for a private life.

“I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey. I’m not kidding. I’d go to theatres, I’d go to galleries, things like that, on my own. And now I can’t and that’s awful,” she said at the BFI Radio Times festival in 2017.

Smith was known for being demanding on herself and others. Theatre director Peter Hall, who worked closely with her for many years, said: “She nags herself into perfection.”

She had a tempestuous eight-year marriage to actor Robert Stephens, which ended while they were playing newly entangled divorcees in Noel Coward’s Private Lives.

They had two sons — actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin.

Smith then married her teenage sweetheart, writer Beverley Cross, a rock of imperturbability for her until his death in 1998.

In 1990, Smith was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and became a Dame.

Tributes paid

Britain’s King Charles III called her “a national treasure” who was admired around the world. Paying tribute to her “warmth and wit that shone through both on and off the stage”, he posted a photograph of him sharing a joke with the actor.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer also called her a “true national treasure” while the Bafta TV and Film Academy saluted “a legend of British stage and screen”.

Whoopi Goldberg, who starred in Sister Act and Sister Act 2 alongside Smith, wrote on Instagram: “Maggie Smith was a great woman and a brilliant actress.

“I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to work with the ‘one-of-a-kind’,” she added.

UK actor Kristin Scott Thomas, who appeared alongside Smith in My Old Lady said her co-star “saw through the nonsense and razzmatazz” of acting.

“She had a sense of humour and wit that could reduce me to a blithering puddle of giggles. And she did not have patience with fools,” she wrote on Instagram.

“Somehow I thought she’d live forever,” Harry Potter author JK Rowling posted on X, formerly Twitter. “RIP Dame Maggie Smith.”

Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe also paid tribute. “I will always consider myself amazingly lucky to have been able to work with her, and to spend time around her on set,” he said in a statement.

“The word legend is overused but if it applies to anyone in our industry then it applies to her. Thank you Maggie.”

Emma Watson, who played Hermione Granger in the franchise took to her Instagram account and shared that she had no idea of Smith’s legend. “It’s only as I’ve become an adult I’ve come to appreciate that I shared the screen with a true definition of greatness”.

Julian Fellowes, creator and writer of Downton Abbey, said Smith had a “marvellous instinctive grasp, she could make you cry your eyes out one minute and laugh like a drain the next without turning into someone different.

“I realised I was working with a great genius,” he added.

Actor Hugh Bonneville, who played the son of the dowager duchess in the period drama, said: “Anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent.”