Actress Dame Maggie Smith attends the Royal Film Performance and World Premiere of the film, “The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel”, in Leicester Square, London on February 17, 2015.
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Maggie Smith, a clever and scene-stealing actor who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and gained new fans in the 21st century as the widow Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in the film. Harry Potter movie, died on Friday. He is 89 years old.
Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.
“She leaves behind two sons and five beloved grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of a wonderful mother and grandmother,” she said in a statement issued by publicist Clair Dobbs.
Smith is often rated as the leading British actress of a generation that includes Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, an Academy Award nomination and a shelf full of acting trophies.
He remained in demand even in his later years, although he lamented that “if you enter the era of grandmothers, you will get something.”
Smith quickly sums up her role as a “gallery of grotesques,” including Professor McGonagall. Asked why he took on the role, he replied: “Harry Potter is my retirement.”
Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in the television production “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the smartest actress I’ve worked with. You have to get up very early in the morning to beat Maggie Smith.”
“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerous Edinburgh schoolteacher, brought her an Academy Award for best actress, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA) as well.
British actress Maggie Smith, UK, March 8, 1974. She appeared in the stage comedy ‘Snap!’ at the Vaudeville Theater on the Strand in London.
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Smith added supporting actress Oscars for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for leading actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View.” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.
She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”
Since 2010, she has played Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the TV drama “Downton Abbey”, a role that won her many fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and many other award nominations. .
He continued to act well into his 80s, in the 2022 big screen spin-off “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”
Smith has a reputation for being difficult, and sometimes belittling others.
Richard Burton said that Smith didn’t just shoot a scene in “The VIPs” with him: “He did a big heist.” However, director Peter Hall found that Smith is not “really hard unless he’s among idiots. He’s very hard on himself, and I don’t think he knows why he’s not very hard on others.”
Smith admits he may be impatient.
“It’s true that I don’t tolerate stupid people, but they don’t tolerate me, so I’m spiky,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m pretty good at playing pointy old ladies.”
Critic Frank Rich, in his New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “a classicist of style who can slant a line as prosaic as ‘Aren’t you marmalade?’ until it sounds like a recent epigram by Coward or Wilde.”
Smith famously laughed at the prosaic line – “Haddock is disgusting” – in the 1964 revival of Noel Coward “Hay Fever.”
He repeats his gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when the tradition-bound Violet asks, “What’s the weekend?”
Fellow actors paid tribute to him there. Hugh Bonneville, who played the son of Smith’s character in “Downton Abbey,” said that “anyone who has ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, intelligence and amazing talent.”
“He was a true legend of his generation and will thankfully live on in many wonderful screen performances,” he said in a statement.
Rob Lowe, who played with him in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said “I had an unforgettable experience working with him; showing two shots like being paired with a lion.”
“He can eat anyone alive, and often does. But it’s funny, and great company. And he doesn’t suffer fools. We’ll see no more. God speed, Ms. Smith!” Lowe wrote in X.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be honored for generations to come.”
Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, on the eastern edge of London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life in a nutshell: “One school, one wanted to act, one started acting, one is still acting.”
His father was deployed in 1939 for war duty in Oxford, where he studied theater at the Oxford Playhouse School leading to a busy apprenticeship.
“I did a lot of things, you know, around the university there… If you’re smart enough and I think you’re fast enough, you can almost do a rep every week because all the colleges do different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.
She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.
Left to right: Joyce Redman (1915 – 2012) as Emilia, Maggie Smith as Desdemona, and Laurence Olivier (1907 – 1989) as Othello, in Stuart Burge’s film version of Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’, Shepperton Studios, Surrey, July 1965.
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Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of the original National Theater company and cast her as a co-star in the 1965 film adaptation of “Othello.”
Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both in National Theater productions, were important influences.
Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for boredom. As the actor Jeremy Brett said, “he starts divinely and then dies, rather like cheese.”
“So the fact that we only had enough time to do it was an absolute blessing because they were so fresh and so happy,” Bennett said. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a questionable woman who has lived for years in a vehicle on Bennett’s London Road.
However extravagant he may have been on stage or in front of the camera, Smith is known to be intensely personal.
“He never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something he was afraid of because if he did, it would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who appeared with him in “A Room with a View.”
Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, equivalent to a knighthood, in 1990.
She married actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby – both actors – and divorced in 1975. In the same year she married writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.
