Celebrate the late, great doyenne of stage and screen with these films, many of which you can watch for free

Dame Maggie Smith attends the premiere of “Quartet” during the 56th BFI London Film Festival at Odeon Leicester Square on Oct. 15, 2012, in London.Stuart Wilson/Getty Images

You’ve seen Dame Maggie Smith in every iteration of “Downton Abbey” and “Harry Potter.” Now it’s time to look at the esteemed career of the actress before she was the Dowager Countess or Minerva McGonagall. The list is by no means complete. “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” should be here, but it is currently unavailable on streaming platforms. There are also some great films, such as “A Room With a View,” “Murder by Death,” and “A Private Function,” that are worth your attention. But, in no particular order, here are some moments where Smith showed us her big-screen charisma and award-winning prowess.

1. ‘California Suite’ (1978)

Dame Maggie Smith had a chance to stretch her comedic chops repeatedly through the 1970s. Don’t believe me? Just go to YouTube and watch her ham it up (and sing!) with Carol Burnett. In Neil Simon’s 1978 film “California Suite,” Smith has fun playing Diana Barrie, a British actress nominated for her first best actress Oscar for what she considers a banal comedy. She’s already stressed about the awards ceremony, but things get more complicated when Diana finally confronts her closeted antiques dealer husband (played by Sir Michael Caine) about his sexuality. Smith’s character may have lost the Oscar in the movie, but Smith took home the trophy for best supporting actress at the 1979 Oscars. She and Caine make “California Suite” worth watching.

Maggie Smith holds her Oscar for best supporting actress in the film “California Suite” in Los Angeles, April 9, 1979. Reed Saxon/Associated Press

2. ‘Death on the Nile’ (1978) and ‘Evil Under the Sun’ (1982)

The beautiful locations and all-star casts make these two Agatha Christie adaptations an ideal double feature for a rainy Sunday afternoon. But they’re also an opportunity to catch Smith doing what she does best: standing out and shining in an ensemble cast. That’s a polite way of saying that she steals the spotlight. She may have been sharing the screen with heavy hitters such as Angela Lansbury, Bette Davis, and Sylvia Miles, but Smith commands attention with a mere pursed lip and raised brow. It’s a joy to watch her upstage Diana Rigg as she sings Cole Porter’s “You’re the Tops” in “Evil Under the Sun.”

Maggie Smith in the 1972 film “Travels With My Aunt.”Handout

3. ‘Travels With My Aunt’ (1972)

Smith plays a woman twice her age (she was 38 at the time, and her character was in her 70s) with flaming, Lucille Ball-red hair and an effortless ability to drop devastating and delicious bon mots. There may be other actors in the film, but Smith commands every scene as the frivolous Augusta Bertram, making her ridiculous character’s eccentricities both believable and endearing. Beneath all her self-absorbed wintering, Augusta emerges as a hopeless romantic even after toiling in the oldest profession for most of her life. Director George Cukor originally had Katharine Hepburn (!) in mind for the lead. Thank goodness she passed. Smith was nominated for an Oscar for the film.

4. ‘The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne’ (1987)

Maggie Smith owns the heart-wrenching “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne.” It’s all the more powerful because we’re seeing an actress who we’ve grown to know playing powerful and entirely in control characters portray a troubled and tragic heroine reeling from a crisis of faith. She’s a spinster battling with the bottle and facing a descent into mental illness. If that doesn’t sound like an Oscar-worthy performance, I don’t know what does. There was no Oscar for Smith, but she did take a BAFTA for the role. It’s not a film you want to watch on a date — the Village Voice described it as “The Feel-Bad movie of 1987, just in time for the suicide season.” Perhaps that‘s a bit harsh, but “Judith Hearne” is a criminally overlooked tear-jerker.

Lady’s maid Mary Maceachran (Kelly MacDonald) tends to her employer, Constance, Countess of Trentham (Maggie Smith) in the 2001 film “Gosford Park.”

5. “Gosford Park” (2001)

“Gosford Park” might as well go by the name “Downton Beta Test 1.0.” This is where it all started to come together. There’s a pithy script from Julian Fellowes, a fork-tongued Smith in period garb, social climbing dinner guests, complicated cutlery, servants everywhere, and slights against uncouth Americans. Fast forward nine years, and you have “Downton Abbey.” In his 2001 review of the film, British critic Peter Bradshaw summed it up best when he wrote, “There is one performer who blows everyone away with a deliciously unpleasant, scene-stealing performance: Maggie Smith as the vain, mean Countess of Trentham. Her exquisite snobbery and cruelty is too extensive to itemize here, but suffice it to say that if the company were to take a theatrical bow at the end of the film, Dame Maggie would be good-naturedly pushed forward for a solo flourish and the applause would treble in volume.”