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The celebrated actor Maggie Smith, who won two Oscars and eight Baftas, has died aged 89. The star of stage and screen, known for her prominent roles in Harry Potter and Downton Abbey, as well as her performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, died in hospital on Friday morning, her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens said.

Stephens and Larkin said in a statement: “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning.

“An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”

In a stellar career spanning 60 years, Smith gave life to a host of memorable characters, from Muriel Spark’s passionate Edinburgh girls’ school teacher Jean Brodie, to Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series and Violet Crawley in the ITV drama Downton Abbey.

Her other film hits include the Sister Act franchise and Steven Spielberg’s Hook.

Over her career, Smith worked with theatrical greats including Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Alan Bennett and Dame Judi Dench, while maintaining a prolific film and television presence from the 1960s onwards.

Tributes have poured in since her death was announced. The King and Queen said: “As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage.’’

Sir Keir Starmer called her a “true national treasure”; theatre producer Sir Cameron Mackintosh said she was the “master of the zinger”, while the National Theatre’s Rufus Norris said her “sublime craft and sharp wit were simply legendary”.

The actor was born Margaret Natalie Smith on 28 December 1934 in Ilford, Essex, the youngest child of Nathaniel Smith, a pathologist from Newcastle upon Tyne, and Margaret Hutton, a Glaswegian secretary, who had fallen in love after meeting on a train to London.

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The family relocated to Oxford when their daughter was four. She soon won a scholarship to Oxford High School and, despite a frustrating failure to win parts in school plays – because she was considered “too common”, Smith later alleged – quickly resolved to become an actress, just as her elder twin brothers Alistair and Ian had decided equally emphatically to dedicate themselves to careers in architecture.

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In 1952, when she was 17, she took a job as an assistant stage manager at the Oxford Playhouse, which she later complained had amounted to little more than “making endless cups of tea and playing maids” but which had also seen her make her debut as Viola in Twelfth Night before appearing in such plays as Cinderella, Rookery Nook, Housemaster, W Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale and The Letter and Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector.

In 1956, she went to New York City to make her Broadway debut playing several parts in the revue New Faces of ’56 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre before returning to London the following year to star in the musical comedy Share My Lettuce.

Here she played opposite Kenneth Williams, who would remain a lifelong friend with whom she would appear again, to award-winning effect, in the Peter Shaffer two-parter The Private Ear and the Public Eye at The Globe in 1962.

“She is so singular, a unique actress,” Williams would later say of his co-star, praising her hard work in rehearsals and remembering with particular relish a sketch in which she had played a hostess encouraging her guests to join in a round of party games while artfully swinging a string of beads around her neck and midriff and back again without losing them, a trick only mastered through hours of practice.

Her real stage breakthrough arrived that same year when she was invited by Lord Olivier to join his company at the National Theatre, Sir Laurence having been impressed after seeing her in William Congreve’s The Double-Dealer at The Old Vic, where she had also completed a trio of Shakespeare plays.

She would stay at the National for eight years, enjoying a remarkable run from 1963 to 1965 in particular when she starred in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, played Desdemona in Othello and appeared in Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and Much Ado About Nothing.

However, her relationship with Sir Laurence was often tense and in danger of boiling over into outright rivalry. She later revealed that he had once slapped her in a rehearsal for Othello and criticised her diction, to which she pointedly replied in perfectly crisp vowels, having waited until he was in makeup to play the Moor: “How now, brown cow?”

Nevertheless, the 1965 film version, which gave screen debuts to future knights Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi, secured Oscar nominations for both of its stars.

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Prior to that, Smith had made her uncredited movie debut in Child in the House (1956) but was Bafta-nominated for her first screen role proper, Nowhere to Go (1958), an atypical Ealing crime drama.

Her other screen appearances in the 1960s included roles in the comedy Go to Blazes and Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin-Eater (both 1962), the Terence Rattigan-penned The VIPs (1963), Jack Cardiff’s Sean O’Casey biopic Young Cassidy and the American capers The Honey Pot (1967) and Hot Millions (1968), the former directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz and starring Rex Harrison.

She was part of the impressive ensemble cast of Richard Attenborough’s satirical musical O What a Lovely War! in 1969, the same year in which she played the title role in Ronald Neame’s film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a part that would define her in the public imagination forever afterwards.

Smith was perfectly cast as Spark’s imperious, influential teacher, whose pupils idolise her, not always wisely, and may have taken inspiration from her own mother, at least in accent. She was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance and would appear in another Spark adaptation, Memento Mori, in 1992.

Smith married during this period, wedding fellow actor Robert Stephens on 29 June 1967, with whom she would go on to have two sons: Chris Larkin (born 1967) and Toby Stephens (1969). They too would grow up to join the family business.

After starring in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s London production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler in 1970, she picked up another Academy Award nomination for her work in the veteran George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt (1972) and appeared in Alan J Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973).

Smith subsequently played Peter Pan at the London Coliseum before returning to Broadway in 1975 to play opposite her husband in Coward’s Private Lives, directed by Sir John Gielgud. The stormy relationship between the central characters all too closely echoed that between Smith and Stephens and they would separate that same year.

She was quickly remarried to the playwright Beverley Cross on 23 June 1975. The pair moved to Canada, collaborating on a string of productions at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival (1976-80) and remained together until his death in 1998.

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Her other films of the 1970s included two by Neil Simon, the ensemble whodunit spoof Murder By Death (1976) and California Suite (1978), for which she won her second and final Oscar, this time named Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared in the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978) and returned for a follow-up four years later, Evil Under the Sun (1982), both of which starred Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.

In between, she made Quartet (1981), inspired by Jean Rhys’s novel of the same name, and played Thetis in Clash of the Titans (1981), remembered for Ray Harryhausen’s celebrated stop-motion effects.

The mid-1980s brought Smith’s first screen collaborations with her friends Alan Bennett and Dame Judi Dench: she appeared in A Private Function (1984) scripted by the former and starred with the latter in the Merchant Ivory production of EM Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), securing a fifth Oscar nomination for her turn as Charlotte Bartlett.

She would later triumph in a celebrated 1988 instalment of Bennett’s television monologues Talking Heads (“A Bed Among the Lentils”) and on both stage and screen as Miss Shepherd in his The Lady in the Van . She would appear with Dench in Tea with Mussolini (1999), David Hare’s play The Breath of Life (2002), Ladies in Lavender (2004) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its 2015 sequel.

The early 1990s saw Smith make a number of memorable appearances in hit American films, from playing the older Wendy Darling in Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991) to her role as a disapproving Mother Superior opposite Whoopi Goldberg’s undercover lounge singer in Sister Act (1992).

Further literary adaptations followed, including roles in The Secret Garden (1993), Richard Loncraine’s Second World War-set Richard III (1995) opposite Ian McKellen and films of Henry James’s Washington Square (1997) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1999), as well as altogether camper fare such as The First Wives Club (1996) supporting Diane Keaton, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn.

Television provided an additional showcase for her talents in her later years and she appeared in a famed American broadcast of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1993) a BBC dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1999) and the TV films My House in Umbria (2003) and Capturing Mary (2007).

The turn of the new millennium saw Smith step into another role with which she would be closely associated thereafter and which would introduce her to a younger generation of filmgoers.

She first donned a witches’ hat to play Minerva McGonagall, the strict but kindly transfiguration instructor and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 and would reprise the role in six more films in that blockbuster franchise, based on JK Rowling’s best-selling novels.

She would later recount meetings with young fans, who would inquire suspiciously whether she had really turned into a cat.

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That same year, she was in scene-stealing form in Robert Altman’s English country house drama Gosford Park, picking up her final Academy Award nod and finding another important collaborator in Julian Fellowes, who would soon write her another plum part as the vinegary Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the popular television series Downton Abbey (2010-15).

Asked by chat show host Graham Norton whether she was glad the series was coming to an end in 2015, Smith answered, without a moment’s hesitation: “Oh yeah! No, I really am. Honestly, by the time we finished she must have been 110 so I couldn’t go on and on!”

Asked whether she had ever actually seen an episode of Downton, she replied, rather more guiltily: “I’ve got the box set…”

A giant of theatre and a deft character player on film, extremely committed and rarely out of work, Smith was nevertheless something of a perennial outsider, despite the adulation she received throughout her career, having acquired a reputation as rather spiky and acid-tongued, disinclined to suffer fools gladly.

On whether she had ever felt inclined to try to correct this perception, she told an audience at London’s Tricycle Theatre in March 2017: “It’s gone too far now to take back. If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work – it would frighten people more if I were nice. They’d be paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to. But perhaps I should try it… ‘Hello! What fun! We’re going to be here all day! And then filming all night too! Goodie! And it’s so lovely and cold!’”

Phillip Schofield has said he will be “forever sorry” in his first television appearance in more than a year since his shock downfall.

Schofield, now 62, quit ITV and admitted to having lied about an “unwise, but not illegal” affair with a younger male colleague at This Morning last May. His agent parted ways with him and he has stayed out of the spotlight since.

On Monday, he will appear on primetime screens for the first time in 16 months, fronting Channel 5’s latest iteration of Cast Away. The three-part programme will follow Schofield as he battles to survive on an island off the coast of Madagascar for nearly two weeks. The show has been largely self-shot by Schofield.

In a screening of the first episode shown to press, Schofield said he had been “cancelled” after his exit from ITV and the ensuing public backlash over the affair. Describing the period afterwards, he said: “It is like the biggest grenade going off in your life and you know you let people down, you know you’ve let yourself down, it was an unwise and unprofessional thing to do.

“I will be forever sorry. You know, I screwed up. I made a mistake and I hurt the people around me.”

His wife, Stephanie Lowe, and daughters, Molly, 31, and Ruby, 28, also appear in the show. In a scene during a family barbecue, Lowe says: “What people don’t realise is that they batter [Phillip] but then there are other people affected.” Molly said the scandal had made the family closer and called her father “just amazing”.

The actor Joanna Lumley appears in a video message with survival tips for Schofield. The Absolutely Fabulous star fronted a BBC reality show called Girl Friday in 1994 when she had to survive nine days on the island of Nosy Tsarabanjina, near Madagascar. At the end of the message, she says: “I shall be thinking of you all the time Phil, and actually I’m a little bit jealous, lots of love.”

Later in the episode, Schofield suggests he was “so, so close” to killing himself. He said: “I had everything in place, everything was set up and everything was ready.

“Molly said: ‘Do you imagine what this would do to us if you actually managed to pull this off? Can you imagine what would happen and can you imagine what it would do to me if you did this on my watch?’ And that was just enough to take a step back from the edge.”

His return to primetime TV has met a mixed response. Mark Borkowski, a crisis PR consultant and author, rebutted Schofield’s claim that he is a victim of cancel culture. Writing in the Guardian, he said: “This was a spectacular career collapse sparked by a serious HR violation, an abuse of power and a betrayal of his inner circle, not to mention millions of viewers who saw one man and realised he was another.”

Borkowski said the show was “clearly designed to propel Schofield into a redemption arc” and that he must “put in the performance of a lifetime” to pull it off.

The journalist Siobhan Synnot told Times Radio this was a safe option for Schofield. She said: “He’s going to be in control of the narrative, he’s going to be able to talk to the camera. He’s the man who does the filming, it’s prerecorded. He can ask the questions that he’d love to answer, he doesn’t have to ask himself the awkward questions.”

The Loose Women co-host Nadia Sawalha said she “cringed” when the teaser for the show was released earlier this week. Speaking on her Coffee Moaning podcast, she said Schofield was “very clever” and “knows how to speak to an audience”.

“I have always stood up and against people in positions of power and money and status. I will always stick up for the young person that was swayed by that,” she added.

NEWLY-SINGLE Joey Essex fuelled rumors of returning to TOWIE after reuniting with his former co-star.

Joey, 34, left hit reality show The Only Way is Essex back in 2013 – but could he be making a return?

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The star rose to fame after appearing on the popular Essex-based reality show between 2011 and 2013.

During his stint on TOWIE, fans saw him date Sam Faiers.

The couple had an on and off relationship for a few years and were even engaged.

Their engagement ended during a dramatic TOWIE trip to Marbella in 2014. 

In 2013, Joey took a huge risk and quit TOWIE to pursue a career in entertainment.

Shortly after, he was approached to take part in the 2013 series of I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out Of Here.

However, fans think Joey might return to TOWIE after attending a friend’s wedding with his former co-star James Bennewith (aka Diags).

The pair looked dapper wearing suave black suits and dark shades.

Could Joey be rejoining his friends on the ITVBe reality show?

Since his departure from TOWIE, Joey has appeared on many reality shows, such as Splash (2013), I’m A Celeb (2013), The Jump (2015), Celebs Go Dating (2016–2019, 2021), Celebrity Ex on the Beach (2020), Dancing on Ice (2023), Love Island (2024).

Joey has also made money from investing in property over the years.

And is rumoured to appear on the Netflix real estate show Selling Sunset in a new series. 

Joey is in talks to tour Hollywood homes with his cousin, Chloe Sims, a fellow TOWIE star, to find a place to buy in the US.

This comes after blonde bombshell Joey’s ex girlfriend Jessy Potts, 25, was seen cosying up to fellow Islander Ronnie Vint, 28, in the back of a taxi as they made their way to a White Fox Event.

The reality beauty was all glammed up in a stunning ivory dress as she sat next to a dapper looking Ronnie.

The pair were also joined by ex islander Lucinda Strafford, 24, however, the reality beauty was left third wheeling as eagle-eyed fans noticed how close Jessy and Ronnie looked.

Fans took to social media to comment on the potential new relationship, one user said: “Umm Ronnie and Jessy.”

“Jessy and Ronnie new couple???” another penned.

“Ngl Ronnie and Jessy would be something” added a third.

Joey and Jessy split just seven weeks after leaving the villa.

The Love Island stars confirming the news exclusively to The Sun, with Towie legend Joey, 34, insisting he hopes to stay friends with Jessy.

Speaking about the breakup, he said: “Unfortunately, we have decided to call an end to the relationship but I hope we can continue to be friends.

“I truly wish Jessy the very best with whatever she does in the future.”

And Jessy added: “I appreciate the Love Island experience I had with Joey, we tried to make it work but it wasn’t to be.

“I’m so grateful to everyone who supported us and look forward to all of the exciting opportunities ahead.”

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