Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died Friday in London. She was 89.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. It did not specify the cause of death.
American moviegoers barely knew Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have provocative views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her the Academy Award for best actress.
She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.
In real life, prizes had begun coming Smith’s way in 1962, when she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.
Until “Downton Abbey.”
That series followed the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his mostly aristocratic family and his troubled household staff at their grand Jacobean mansion as the world around them, between 1912 and 1925, refused to stand still.
A Breakout Star
After its premiere in Britain in 2010 and in the United States a year later, the show ran for six seasons. Its breakout star, from the beginning, was Smith, playing Lord Grantham’s elderly and still stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess. She disapproved of electric lights, was unfamiliar with the word “weekend” and never met a person or situation she couldn’t ridicule with withering imperiousness. When her daughter-in-law considered sending a younger relative for a stay in New York, Lady Violet objected: “Oh, I don’t think things are quite that desperate.”
Suddenly, in her mid-70s, Smith was a megastar.
“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’” she told arts journalist Mark Lawson at the BFI and Radio Times Television Festival in 2017. She added later, “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
The closest Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry’s stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films, from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011).
Margaret Natalie Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, which was a town in Essex at the time and is now part of the borough of Redbridge in London. Her father, Nathaniel Smith, was a public-health pathologist, and her mother, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, was a secretary who was born in Scotland.
When Maggie was 5, the family moved to Oxford, where her father taught. After studying at the Oxford School for Girls, she joined the newly formed Oxford Playhouse and made her acting debut in 1952 in “Twelfth Night.”
Her early films included “The V.I.P.s” (1963), a Technicolor melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), a marital drama written by Harold Pinter and based on a novel by Penelope Mortimer. In the first, she was the mousy, adoring secretary of a handsome tycoon (Rod Taylor). In the second, she was Anne Bancroft’s weird houseguest who wouldn’t shut up — or leave. Both films were made before her 30th birthday, but both characters were, in their own ways, already world-weary.
New York was never a significant factor in Smith’s career. After her Broadway debut, in the revue “New Faces of 1956,” she stayed away for almost two decades. Returning in 1975, she played the sophisticated Amanda Prynne in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” about a divorced couple who reconnect while honeymooning with their second spouses, then appeared in Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” (1979) as a mining magnate’s unhappy wife. She received Tony nominations for both roles.
In “Lettice and Lovage” (1990), Smith played a tour guide who makes up outrageous (and vastly entertaining) lies about the old houses she shows people through. Frank Rich paid tribute in his review for the Times: “Miss Smith’s personality so saturates everything around her that, like the character she plays, she instantly floods a world of gray with color,” he wrote. “This is idiosyncratic theater acting of a high and endangered order.”
That performance won her a Tony for best actress in a play. But Broadway was a blink of the eye compared with the British stage.
In the early 1960s, Smith starred opposite Laurence Olivier at the National Theater in “Othello,” as Desdemona, the devoted but doomed wife. (The 1965 movie version brought her the first of her six Oscar nominations.)
A British Stage Record
She won six Evening Standard awards (a record) for stage performances, beginning with “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye” (1962), Peter Shaffer’s comedy double bill.
That was followed by the title role in “Hedda Gabler” (1970), director Ingmar Bergman’s first production outside Scandinavia. In the 1980s, Smith won for Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia” (1981), in which she played novelist Virginia Woolf, and for her role as the willful Millamant in “The Way of the World” (1984), William Congreve’s Restoration comedy about marriage and money.
In 1994, Smith won for playing the oldest of the title characters in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” Paul Taylor’s review in The Independent described her as “the person who hardened into a monster because she has had the burden of being strong for everyone in the family.”
After a 25-year break, Smith won for “A German Life” (2019), in which she portrayed Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’ longtime secretary.
Yet it was the film industry that made her an international star.
She appeared in some mainstream American hits, including “Sister Act” (1992), as the mother superior trying to tame a nightclub singer (Whoopi Goldberg) hiding out at the convent, and “The First Wives Club” (1996), as a soignée Manhattan divorcée who sympathizes with younger women’s travails.
Cinematic Time Traveler
The rest of the time, Smith was something of a time traveler. “I’m always in corsets, and I’m always in wigs, and I’m always in those buttoned boots,” she told film critic Barry Norman in a 1993 television interview. She added, “I can’t remember when I last appeared in modern dress.”
Smith did wear modern dress in some films, like “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” (2011) and its sequel, about British retirees in India; and “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” (2002), about a group of American Southerners who have been friends since childhood.
On the other hand, “Becoming Jane” (2007), about the young Jane Austen, was set in the 1790s. In a BBC version of “David Copperfield” (1999), Smith was Betsey Trotwood, a grouchy but loving Georgian-Regency great-aunt. (Daniel Radcliffe, age 10, played the title role.)
Although television was a relatively small part of her résumé, she won four Emmy Awards. Her first was for HBO’s “My House in Umbria” (2003), in which she played a romance novelist; the other three were for “Downton Abbey.”
Her final films included “The Lady in the Van” (2015), in which she played a strong-willed homeless woman; “A Boy Called Christmas” (2021); “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022), the second of two “Downton Abbey” films, which introduced the Granthams to both Hollywood and the French Riviera; and “The Miracle Club” (2023), a comedy with Laura Linney and Kathy Bates.
In 1967, Smith married Robert Stephens, a British actor who was her frequent co-star, beginning with “Jean Brodie.” They divorced in 1974. In 1975, she married Beverley Cross, a playwright and screenwriter. He died in 1998.
She is survived by two sons from her first marriage, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, both actors; and five grandchildren, according to the family’s statement.
Smith developed Graves’ disease, an immune-system condition that affects the thyroid gland, in 1988 but recovered after radiotherapy and surgery. Two decades later, she fought off breast cancer.
She became a Commander of the British Empire in 1969, a dame in 1990 and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor in 2014.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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