With her precise, sometimes rapid-fire, articulation and her meticulous stagecraft, she is adept at both comedic and serious roles. Trained at the Oxford Playhouse School, she first appeared on stage as Viola in Twelfth Night (1952), but her professional career began with a Broadway revue called New Faces of 1956. Her first film appearance was in Nowhere to Go (1958).
She joined the Young Vic Company the following year and won acclaim for playing in Shakespeare and James Barrie, Eugene Ionesco and Peter Shaffer, but it was the title role in the Jean Kerr comedy Mary, Mary that made her a London stage star. In 1963 she was invited to join the National Theatre, where she remained until the early '70s and where her acting began to acquire legendary status
Appearances in The Pumpkin Eater(1964), Young Cassidy(1965), The Honey Pot(1967), Hot Millions(1968), and Oh! What a Lovely War(1969) didn't do much to boost her stock with American audiences, but her dynamic, Oscar-winning performance as an eccentric schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) finally established her here as a star.
She received another Best Actress nomination for her role in Travels With My Aunt(1972), starred in Love and Pain (1972), and won her second Oscar, playing an actress who's nominated for an Oscar-and loses in Neil Simon's California Suite (1978). She worked for Merchant and Ivory in Quartet (1981) and then earned another Oscar nomination for her performance in their Room With a View( (1985).
She made a charming Nora Charles-type female detective in Murder by Death (1976), played suspects in the all-star Agatha Christie whodunits Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982), and managed to make her presence felt in the special effects-laden fantasy Clash of the Titans (1981), as Thetis.
She starred opposite Monty Python star Michael Palin in The Missionary (1982) and A Private Function (1985). In The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne(1987) she played a lonely Irish woman struggling in humble surroundings. Meanwhile, she became Wendy in Steven Spielberg’s Peter Pan film Hook (1991). She played a Mother Superior in the hit comedy Sister Act (1992) and a housekeeper in The Secret Garden (1993).
Recently, she played the part of Deputy Headmistress Minerva McGonagall in the film version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (2001)
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