Maggie Smith, Two-Time Oscar Winner and ‘Downton Abbey’ Star, Dies at 89
Maggie Smith, the two-time Oscar and four-time Emmy winner whose work in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Downton Abbey — plus everything before and after — made her one of the most formidable British actors of all time, died Friday. She was 89.
Her sons, actors Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, told the BBC that she died “peacefully in hospital … an intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves two sons and five loving grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”
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“We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days.”
Best known in recent years for matriarchal roles in seven of the Harry Potter films and the ITV-PBS series Downton Abbey, Smith earned early acclaim with a best actress Oscar in 1970 for portraying the titular schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969).
That was followed nine years later by an Academy Award for best supporting actress for the comedy California Suite (1978), in which she portrayed an Oscar-nominated actress who travels from England for the awards ceremony.
She was also nominated for four other Oscars — as best actress for her work in Travels With My Aunt (1972) and for supporting turns in Othello (1965), A Room With a View (1985) and Gosford Park (2001).
In a career that flourished well into her 80s, Smith played the stern yet compassionate Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series and the irascible Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in Downton Abbey.
Known for her privileged sensibilities (“What is a weekend?”) and zingers, Violet won Smith three best supporting actress Emmys, though she publicly admitted that she had never watched the series, even after it ended. “There came a point when it was too late to catch up,” she joked.
In 1989, Queen Elizabeth II bestowed Smith with the title of “dame” for her dramatic accomplishments. The queen granted her another distinction in 2014, making her the 47th member of the Order of Companions of Honor, in the company of such other recipients as Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench.
She won a best actress Tony Award in 1990 for her performance in the comedy Lettice and Lovage.
Smith’s prodigious talent enabled her to play roles from tragedy to comedy with equal facility, earning her a perennial spot on the lists of top British actresses. Her flair for humor, going to core of the characters’ neuroses and idiosyncrasies, as well as for drama, plumbing the depths of their fears and demons, resulted in wide-ranging performances.
In short, she discovered the essence of her characters and channeled it through her own performing powers. “The boundary between laughter and tears is where Maggie is always poised,” said director Alan Bennett, who worked with Smith on the 2015 comedy The Lady in the Van.
She often delivered inspired performances in comedies, including in Murder by Death (1976) as Dora, the high-society wife of David Niven’s detective, Dick Charleston. She was amusing as the humorless Mother Superior in Sister Act (1992) and its sequel the following year; endearing opposite Robin Williams as Granny Wendy in Hook (1991); and droll as a cantankerous retiree visiting India in Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011).
Smith was famously press shy — which became a running joke at the 2016 Emmys when host Jimmy Kimmel instituted the “Maggie Smith Rule,” saying that no one would be allowed to win unless they accepted their award in person (she won, despite not being present, and responded to Kimmel’s jabs with good humor) — and often avoided the media tours that were required to promote such projects as Downton Abbey.
“I’d been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey, and life was fine — nobody knew who the hell I was,” Smith joked at the 2017 BFI + Radio Times TV festival, blaming television for stardom that increasingly affected her ability to go out in public. Of the show’s completion after six seasons, she told The Telegraph, “It was right to stop. It was one of those odd things — nobody knew it was going to go careering on as long as it did, and it was jolly exhausting.”
However, Smith would return for the Downton Abbey movie in 2019 and its sequel, Downton Abbey: A New Era, in 2022.
In addition to her Emmys for Downton Abbey, Smith won outstanding lead actress in 2003 for the drama My House in Umbria, playing a romance novelist who opens up her home to three survivors of a terrorist attack.
The actress, like several of her beloved characters, had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. Said Richard Eyre, who directed her in Suddenly Last Summer (1993), “She doesn’t indulge foolishness, and that is regardless of rank. You have to tread carefully, because if you say something ill-thought or ill-expressed, she will not let it go. It’s a fantastic discipline, because it obliges you to be very clear in your thinking.”
She addressed her bluntness in an interview with The Guardian, saying: “Every time I start anything, I think, ‘This time I’m going to be like Jude [Dench], and it will all be lovely, it will be merry and bright, the Quaker will come out in me.'” But, she added, “It’s gone too far now to take back. If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work — it would frighten people more if I were nice. They’d be paralyzed with fear. And wonder what I was up to.”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, a lower-middle-class area of Essex, England. She was the youngest of three — her twin brothers, Ian and Alistair, six years older, became architects — and her father was a medical laboratory technician. She studied at the Oxford Playhouse School, making her stage debut in 1952 and working in the thriving revue scene there.
She moved to America and performed in her first film, Nowhere to Go, in 1958, then appeared in The V.I.P.s (1963), the airport-set drama that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Her stirring performance as Desdemona in Laurence Olivier’s 1965 movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello won Smith her first Oscar nom. Four years later came her Oscar-winning portrayal of an idiosyncratic English schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (That film was directed by Ronald Neame, whose grandson, Gareth Neame, was an executive producer on Downton.)
She also distinguished herself in the Hercule Poirot whodunits Death on the Nile (1978) and Evil Under the Sun (1982). During the ’80s, Smith demonstrated her comedic agility: She starred opposite Monty Python alumnus Michael Palin in The Missionary (1982) and was uproarious as a snooty society woman in A Private Function (1984).
On the other side of the character spectrum, she tapped into the despair of everyday characters. In 1987, she poignantly conveyed the debilitating isolation of an unnoticed Irish woman in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne. Smith likewise excelled with Shakespearean and classic fare, including as the Duchess of York in the film version of Richard III (1995), in addition to Othello.
Her other movie credits include Oh! What A Lovely War (1969), where she played a music hall star; Quartet (1981), as a famous retired opera singer; The Secret Garden (1993), as head housekeeper Mrs. Medlock; The First Wives Club (1996), as a wealthy New York City socialite; and Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (2002), as Caro, one of the original Ya-Yas.
Her performances on television were equally auspicious. In addition to her Emmy-winning turns for Downton and My House in Umbria, Smith was nominated for her roles as Mrs. Venable in Suddenly Last Summer; as Mary Gilbert in 2010’s Capturing Mary; and as Betsey Trotwood in the 1999 BBC miniseries David Copperfield opposite Daniel Radcliffe, who credited Smith with getting him cast as Harry Potter.
Smith was married to playwright Beverley Cross from 1975 until his death in 1998. She earlier was married to The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes star Robert Stephens — also her co-star in Miss Jean Brodie — and had Chris (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) and Toby (Die Another Day) with him.
Lily Ford contributed to this report.
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