who plays dowager countess of grantham in downton abbey
Maggie Smith 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,[5][6] 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,[7] and the Bodley Medal by the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries in 2016.[8]
Mare Winningham In 2006, she landed the role of Susan Grey on the ABC drama Grey's Anatomy where she played the stepmother of one of the main characters, Dr. Meredith Grey. Her character was killed off in May 2007.[2] In 2006, Winningham voiced the audio version of Stephen King's Lisey's Story. In 2007, she voiced Alice Hoffman's Skylight Confessions. In 2010, Winningham starred in an episode of Cold Case as main character Lilly Rush's stepmother, Celeste Cooper.[10] In 2011 she appeared in the fourth episode of Torchwood: Miracle Day as character Ellis Hartley Monroe.[11] She also starred in miniseries Mildred Pierce and Hatfields & McCoys and garnered another two Emmy nominations.[1] In 2012, she appeared Off-Broadway as Beth, the mother in an intellectual, though dysfunctional, British family, in the award-winning comic-drama Tribes by Nina Raine.