who plays dowager countess of grantham in downton abbey
Smith played Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series (2001 -- 11). Other notable films include Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973), Death on the Nile (1978), Clash of the Titans (1981), Evil Under the Sun (1982), Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and The Lady in the Van (2015). She won an Emmy Award in 2003 for My House in Umbria, to become one of the few actresses to have achieved the Triple Crown of Acting, and starred as Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey (2010 -- 15), for which she won three Emmys, her first non-ensemble Screen Actors Guild Award and her third Golden Globe. Her honorary awards include the BAFTA Special Award in 1993, the BAFTA Fellowship in 1996, and the Special Olivier Award in 2011. She received the Stratford Shakespeare Festival's Legacy Award in 2012, and the Bodley Medal by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries in 2016.