Dame Margaret Natalie Smith (28 December 1934 – 27 September 2024) was a British actress. Known for her wit in both comedic and dramatic roles, she had an extensive career on stage and screen for over seven decades and was one of Britain's most recognisable and prolific actresses. She received numerous accolades, including two Academy Awards, five BAFTA Awards, four Emmy Awards, three Golden Globe Awards and a Tony Award, as well as nominations for six Olivier Awards. Smith is one of the few performers to earn the Triple Crown of Acting.

Smith began her stage career as a student, performing at the Oxford Playhouse in 1952, and made her professional debut on Broadway in New Faces of '56. Over the following decades Smith established herself alongside Judi Dench as one of the most significant British theatre performers, working for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. On Broadway, she received the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for Lettice and Lovage (1990). She was Tony-nominated for Noël Coward's Private Lives (1975) and Tom Stoppard's Night and Day (1979).

Smith won two Academy Awards: one Best Actress award for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and one Best Supporting Actress award for California Suite (1978). She was Oscar-nominated for Othello (1965), Travels with My Aunt (1972), A Room with a View (1985) and Gosford Park (2001). She portrayed Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2011). She also acted in Death on the Nile (1978), Hook (1991), Sister Act (1992), The Secret Garden (1993), The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012), Quartet (2012) and The Lady in the Van (2015).

Smith received newfound attention and international fame for her role as Violet Crawley in the British period drama Downton Abbey (2010–2015). The role earned her three Primetime Emmy Awards; she had previously won one for the HBO film My House in Umbria (2003). Over the course of her career she was the recipient of numerous honorary awards, including the British Film Institute Fellowship in 1993, the BAFTA Fellowship in 1996 and the Society of London Theatre Special Award in 2010. Smith was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990.

Margaret Natalie Smith was born on 28 December 1934 in Ilford, Essex. Her mother, Margaret Hutton (née Little), was a Scottish secretary from Glasgow, and her father, Nathaniel Smith, was a public-health pathologist from Newcastle upon Tyne, who worked at the University of Oxford. The family moved to Oxford when Smith was four years old. She had older twin brothers, Alistair and Ian. The latter went to architecture school. Smith was educated at Oxford High School until the age of 16, when she left to study acting at the Oxford Playhouse.

In 1952, aged 17, under the auspices of the Oxford University Dramatic Society, Smith began her career as Viola in Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse. She continued to act in productions at the Oxford Playhouse, including Cinderella (1952), Rookery Nook (1953), Cakes and Ale (1953) and The Government Inspector (1954). That same year, she appeared in the television programme Oxford Accents (1954) produced by Ned Sherrin. In 1956 Smith made her Broadway debut playing several roles in the review New Faces of '56, at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre from June to December 1956. In 1957 she starred opposite Kenneth Williams in the musical comedy Share My Lettuce, written by Bamber Gascoigne.

In 1962 Smith won the first of a record six Best Actress Evening Standard Awards for her roles in Peter Shaffer's plays The Private Ear and The Public Eye, again opposite Kenneth Williams. She caught the eye of Laurence Olivier, who, after seeing her in The Double Dealer at The Old Vic, invited her to become part of his new National Theatre Company soon after it was formed at The Old Vic in 1962. Alongside Derek Jacobi and Michael Gambon, she soon became a fixture at the National Theatre in the 1960s. The theatre critic Michael Coveney wrote that during her eight years in the company, Smith developed a fierce rivalry with Olivier writing, "He knew immediately he'd met his match – that she was extraordinary. He said that anyone who can play comedy that well can also play tragedy and he offered her the likes of Desdemona in Shakespeare's Othello. But having got her into the company they became not enemies, but professional rivals. Never before had anyone on stage been quicker than him and now, it seemed, there was a contest."

During a 1964 production of Othello, Olivier struck Smith across the face, knocking her out. She later recalled the incident on a 2015 edition of The Graham Norton Show and in the 2018 documentary Nothing Like a Dame. She appeared opposite Olivier as Sylvia in The Recruiting Officer in 1963–64 and again as Hilde in Ibsen's The Master Builder in 1964–65. Smith's 1967 portrayal of Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, by the director Franco Zeffirelli, is thought to be the earliest British television broadcast of the entire play. The screen version was assumed lost until a copy was discovered in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC in 2010.