Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and traversed the stage and screen – has died at age 89. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Friday morning, her publicist confirmed.

Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would’ve dared try.

Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey‘s formidable Lady Violet.

Act One: Precise diction in her prime

What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early. She arrived on the professional stage in her teens, and graduated quickly to Britain’s National Theater, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of restoration comedy, and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.

Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 — her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

“Give me a gherll at an impressionable age,” she purred, “and she is mine for life.”

The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including Travels With My Aunt and Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Show, and on stage, held title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.

Maggie Smith in February 1969.

Roy Jones/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

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All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn’t want to “sob all over Burt Reynolds.”

No sobs in Smith’s actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.

Act Two: Best exotic roles, some written just for her

All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith’s career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in A Room with a View, primly comic as the mother superior in Sister Act with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van, and downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.

Though he’d been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that point, there was such venom in her declaration that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody,” that McKellen looked shaken. As well he might.

Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and Lovage specifically for her, about an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide “to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And above all wit — her presence is witty. ”

Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton

And then Smith’s career — for which she’d been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and later a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor — had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she’d known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).

Maggie Smith as Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey.

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And while she was casting spells on kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV’s Downton Abbey, where for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloof, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.

That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess’ most famously clueless question — “what is a weekend?” — might almost have been her own.

My brother dropped me off curbside at Los Angeles International Airport and yelled, “Run!” Our timing getting to LAX was thwarted by the kind of notorious L.A. traffic that airline change fees and crushed dreams are made of. Departure to Newark, N.J., was at 8:05 a.m.

It was 7:25 a.m.

I raced through the terminal and up the escalator, two steps at a time, with a carry-on and boots that were not made for running. The line to get through security was a mile long.

“Am I going to make it?” I deliriously asked the TSA agent as I handed him my boarding pass, shaking from the mad dash.

Without a word, he whisked me past a serpentine of travelers and straight to the metal detector. I was baffled. Maybe he was psychic. I thanked him profusely and kept running.

I couldn’t miss this flight.

My mother insisted I fly “home” to New Jersey for my birthday — her treat. I was deep into a drifting divorce, disillusioned, depressed and avoiding the other “D” word … dating. I also was hiding from the unwelcome advances once the word got out. I felt perpetual dread and I felt wobbly. “Snap out of it,” Cher kept telling me in my mind.

By the time I got to Gate 40, I was giddy from shock and out of breath. I looked around and exhaled.

To my left was a tall, bald man wearing glasses and a tweed blazer. He looked familiar. “Who is that?” I whispered to the also tall, handsome man to my right, holding a coffee cup and wondering if I was talking to him.

He looked at me quizzically and squinted: “Isn’t that the guy who wrote ‘L.A. Confidential’?”

Bingo. Impressive. But neither one of us could remember his name. It was fun trying.

Suddenly, I felt compelled to tell this lovely man how close I came to missing the flight, how much traffic there was, how fast I ran, in boots with a heel, and how I imagined he‘d probably experienced the same exact thing minus the boots.

No. He had gotten there hours before, breezed through security and was on his third cup of coffee.

Boarding started. It felt like we both wished there were more time. “It was nice talking with you. Have a great trip,” I said and meant it.

“You too,” he said, smiling back.

Sparks flew.

After the in-flight movie ended, I looked up, and there he was. I waved; I was glad to see him again. I thought he was on his way to the restroom. He wasn’t. He‘d come to find me. It was good I had an aisle seat.

For the next two hours, we dove in, surrounded by strangers.

He’d spent the last few years in L.A. dating around since his divorce. He seemed as universally disillusioned as I was and had told his mom a few days before that he was giving up.

At one point, he knelt down in the aisle to get closer. His salt-and-pepper cool felt warm. He touched my shoulder a few times. I didn’t mind. He was confident, funny and very much a grown man who also seemed impervious to heavy turbulence.

People in the rows nearby could hear everything we were saying. Some were staring. Some climbed over him. Then the beverage cart came butting in. We made plans to have dinner when we returned to L.A. He gave me his card.

“That was incredible,” said the woman next to me, who had pretended to be asleep to give us some privacy. It was incredible. A big cloud lifted. I couldn’t stop smiling.

When I got to baggage claim, there he was again. I told him my mom was coming to pick me up. “Can I meet your mom?”

Her SUV was waiting exactly where we exited. She ran out to hug me and open the liftgate, wondering who this guy was carrying my luggage.

“Mom, this is Mark. We met on the plane,” I said.

“Hi, I’m your daughter’s new boyfriend,” he said as if it were already true.

Without missing a beat, she shot back: “Good, because you’re very handsome.” We said goodbye in a flurry.

“What happened to you on that flight? You’re different. You’re going to marry him,” my mom said emphatically.

I stuttered. I kind of believed her. I was different. Over the next week, we texted and decided on Terroni for dinner, a mutual Italian favorite.

He was waiting for me out front. We spent five hours in a booth drinking, eating and laughing. When we were in the middle of dessert, fireworks went off from the Christmas tree lighting nearby at the Grove. Everyone ran outside. He sat next to me when we came back in for the first kiss. We closed the place down. We didn’t want the night to end.

He made me an engagement ring out of a plastic swizzle stick a few nights later at a sushi bar. We didn’t feel like we were moving too fast. We felt like we couldn’t move fast enough.

With that, I had to move my divorce from stalled to finalized. Quick.

Both of our marriages had come to screeching halts very unexpectedly. He had years of healing under his belt. I was still in the thick of it. I was stuck in quicksand, and he helped pull me out. His patience was steady as I cut cords and untangled myself.

We had planned to get married at a rooftop L.A. restaurant, with skyline views past the smog, to symbolize how we met and fell in love. Exactly two weeks beforehand, however, my mother was rushed to the ER with critical embolisms. We flew a red-eye back East with my brother and his wife.

Miraculously, my mom recovered but couldn’t fly. We canceled the wedding. She was adamant that we still get married on the day we planned: July 8. It was July 7.

Because my brother was going to marry us anyway, we thought: Why not get married on the plane? Flying back to L.A. from New Jersey, the same way we met but in reverse?

And we did. Flying over Tulsa, Okla.

United Airlines published an in-flight magazine story about our on-the-fly midair ceremony with the headline, “On This Flight, I Thee Wed.” Ring-size steel hose clamps from the hardware store served as stand-in wedding bands. A flight attendant crafted a bouquet out of tissues.

“Do you believe in life after love?” I do now, Cher. I finally snapped out of it.

The author is a creative writer and producer who is directing the music-based documentary “Play That, Teo.” She’s a recovering stand-up comic, proudly from New Jersey and now residing in Los Angeles. She’s on Instagram: @olanadigirolamo

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