Dame Maggie Smith, Oscar-Winning Actress and Downton Abbey Star, Dies at 89
Dame Maggie Smith, the iconic and versatile actress, has passed away at the age of 89. Known for her remarkable ability to command the screen, Smith won an Academy Award for her role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969. Over her lengthy career, she garnered widespread acclaim across stage and film, capturing audiences with her powerful performances.
In the 21st century, she gained a new generation of fans with her unforgettable portrayal of the sharp-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham in the hit series Downton Abbey. Additionally, she became a household name among younger audiences for her role as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films.
Her sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, shared in a statement that Dame Maggie Smith passed away early Friday in a London hospital. She leaves behind a legacy of extraordinary talent and a body of work that will continue to inspire and entertain for years to come.
Dame Maggie Smith leaves behind two sons and five much-loved grandchildren. They are all hugely bereft at the loss of this extraordinary mother and grandmother. Her publicist Clair Dobbs made the announcement.
She was very often referred to as the most promising British female performer of her generation after Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench. In her remarkable career, she attained innumerable nominations for the Academy Award besides a treasure trove of acting awards.
Even in her octogenarian years, however, Dame Maggie Smith still finds herself in great demand, though she admits candidly: “Once you cross over into the granny era, it’s by no means easy to find work.”.
Dame Maggie Smith somewhat cynically described her later roles as “a collection of grotesques,” including the memorable Professor McGonagall. On the question of why she chose this iconic role, she was dryly witty, responding: “Harry Potter is my retirement plan, and the money was great.”.
READ MORE: Coroner’s initial findings into man’s death decade ago
Richard Eyre’s Praise
Dame Maggie Smith, directed in the television production of Suddenly Last Summer by Richard Eyre, who described her as “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve ever worked with.” Commenting on her, he said: “You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.”
Career Highlights and Awards
Dame Maggie Smith’s performance as Jean Brodie, a dangerously charismatic schoolteacher from Edinburgh, earned her the Academy Award for Best Actress and the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) in 1969.
Further honours
She added a supporting actress Oscar for California Suite in 1978 with a total of Golden Globe wins for both California Suite and A Room with a View. She has also won BAFTAs for Best Lead Actress in: A Private Function (1984), A Room with a View (1986), and The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1988).
Nominations and Stage Successes
For Othello, Travels with My Aunt, Room with a View, and Gosford Park she got the Supporting Actress Academy Award nominations. She bagged another award, the BAFTA Award as the Best Supporting Actress in Tea with Mussolini. Smith’s talents were discovered on stage when she won her very first Ton
Dame Maggie Smith played the sharp-witted role of Violet Crawley, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the period drama Downton Abbey from 2010 onwards. This role created for her a fan following and garnered three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe, and many more award nominations.
But Smith soon found television stardom a little claustrophobic. As the series ended in 2016, she said to The Associated Press of her great relief: “It’s freedom,” she said. “Not until Downton Abbey was I well-known or stopped in the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs.”
Dame Maggie Smith has continued acting well into her 80s, including her appearances in the big-screen adaptation of Downton Abbey in 2019, its sequel titled Downton Abbey: A New Era in 2022, and the 2023 film The Miracle Club.
Dame Maggie Smith was known to be tough, and sometimes she overpowered with her performances. As Richard Burton once described her performance in The VIPs, Smith doesn’t “just dominate a scene; she commits grand larceny.” On the contrary, in interviews, director Peter Hall states that Smith is “not remotely difficult unless she’s among idiots.” He further added that she was not only harsh on herself but also justified it by calling for the same from others.
She even admitted to being impatient at times. “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky,” she said. “Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”
According to New York Times critic Frank Rich, Lettice and Lovage “is the stylized classicist who can italicize a line as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”
Smith demonstrated, in the 1964 revival of Noël Coward’s Hay Fever, her ability to take mundane lines and turn them into comedic gold, as she spoke the line “This haddock is disgusting” with great humor. The tradition continues in Downton Abbey, where tradition-bound Violet smirks wryly at the question, “What is a weekend?”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern fringe of London. “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, one’s still acting”, she dryly summed up her life at one point.
In 1939, her father was posted to wartime duty in Oxford, where Maggie Smith entered the newly created theater school at the Oxford Playhouse, which proved a hectic apprenticeship. “I was in so many productions around the universities there.. If you were clever and quick enough, you could almost do weekly rep since all the colleges were staging different shows at different times,” she explained in a BBC interview.
She opted to go under the stage name “Maggie” since she did not want to be confused with another person by that name of the stage. Margaret, in a short time, began gaining recognition and was hired by Laurence Olivier, who assigned her to his new National Theatre company. He even featured her as his leading actress in the 1965 film version of Othello.
Dame Maggie Smith’s Influences and Reputation
Maggie Smith describes how she was drawn to two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, at the National. Alan Bennett comments in the filmed version of the solo performance A Bed Among the Lentils with Maggie Smith: “I was apprehensive to be tried because of the rumors about Maggie going out of interest.” Jeremy Brett, who played Sherlock Holmes in Granada Television’s four-part television series, described Maggie Smith the actress saying, “She begins angelically and then runs riot, rather like a cheese.”
Recalls Bennett, “So the fact that we only just had time to do it was an absolute blessing really because she was so fresh and completely engaged.” He also cast Smith in a leading role in The Lady in the Van.
When she wanted to be known for her grand performances on stage and screen, Smith was most private. Simon Callow, who acted opposite her in A Room with a View, relates how he managed to spoil their first encounter by lavishing her with praise.
In 1990, Smith was appointed Dame Commander of the British Empire-a title, in effect, a knighthood.
She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967 and gave birth to two sons, Christopher and Toby, before divorcing in 1975. Smith had married writer Beverley Cross that same year; he died in 1998.
