Q: Which leading lady won her first Best Actress Oscar® for the 1969 film The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? These days she is better known as the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham.

A: Dame Maggie Smith

“Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Maggie Smith's Jean Brodie, the magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic titular character in this 1969 film based on a novel of the same name by Muriel Spark. Brodie is a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II. She remains one of twentieth-century English literature’s most iconic and complex characters—a woman at once admirable and sinister, benevolent and conniving. A bit like the Dowager Countess of Grantham, come to think of it.