Dame Maggie Smith, Oscar-winning star of stage and screen, dies aged 89

Dame Maggie Smith: ‘If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count’ Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

In a career that began in the 1950s, her roles ranged from Desdemona to Miss Jean Brodie, Virginia Woolf and Minerva McGonagall

by Andrew Pulver and Kevin Rawlinson

Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actor described by peers as being “one of a kind” and possessed of a “sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent”, has died aged 89.

Her work, which ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, brought her global recognition, as well as two Oscars and eight Baftas.

The news was announced by her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, who said: “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27 September.

“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.

“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. We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”

Dame Maggie Smith 80th birthday portrait. Photo courtesy Kera Telling Spotting

Tributes were paid by friends and colleagues. Michael Caine said: “It was my privilege to make two films alongside the legendary Maggie Smith. A truly brilliant actress and a dear friend, who I will greatly miss.”

Whoopi Goldberg, with whom Smith worked on the Sister Act films, said: “Maggie Smith was a great woman and a brilliant actress. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to work with a ‘one of a kind’. My heartfelt condolences go out to the family.”

Hugh Bonneville, who appeared alongside Smith in Downton Abbey, said: “Anyone who ever shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent. She was a true legend of her generation and thankfully will live on in so many magnificent screen performances. My condolences to her boys and wider family.”

Smith was also described as a “truly great” actor by Julian Fellowes, the Downton Abbey creator. “She was a joy to write for, subtle, many-layered, intelligent, funny and heart-breaking,” he said. “Working with her has been the greatest privilege of my career, and I will never forget her.”

King Charles and Queen Camilla also paid tribute, saying: “As the curtain comes down on a national treasure, we join all those around the world in remembering with the fondest admiration and affection her many great performances, and her warmth and wit that shone through both off and on the stage.”

David Yates, who directed the final four Harry Potter films, said: “Maggie was a true force of nature on set, formidable, often intimidating – gigantically talented – and always precisely prepared. She also had a wicked sense of humour and a good heart.

“At one point, half way through a marathon schedule of relentless production – I’d been shooting four of the Potter movies back to back – she pulled Yvonne (my wife) to one side and chastised her for not looking after me properly through a particularly heavy run of night shoots.

“Maggie was, very simply, acting royalty, and the presence and power of her work never faltered or dimmed, even when she was struggling with some health-related issues on one of the films. Her personality and her talent lit up whichever set she graced. I’ve been very lucky to work with a huge number of talented actors, but Maggie hovers somewhere above them all.”

Daniel Radcliffe, who starred in the series, said: “I will always consider myself amazingly lucky to have been able to work with her, and to spend time around her on set. The word legend is overused but if it applies to anyone in our industry then it applies to her. Thank you Maggie.”

Smith’s gift for acid-tongued comedy was arguably the source of her greatest achievements: the waspish teacher Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, period yarns such as A Room With a View and Gosford Park, and a series of collaborations on stage and screen with Alan Bennett including The Lady in the Van.

“My career is chequered,” she told The Guardian in 2004. “I think I got pigeonholed in humour … If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count. Comedy is never considered the real thing.”

Maggie Smith in the title role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969). Photograph: Ronald Grant

But Smith also excelled in non-comedic dramatic roles, performing opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning a best actress Bafta for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler.

Born in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford and began acting at the city’s Playhouse theatre as a teenager. While appearing in a string of stage shows, including Bamber Gascoigne’s 1957 musical comedy Share My Lettuce opposite Kenneth Williams, Smith also made inroads on film, with her first substantial impact in the 1958 Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go, for which she was nominated for a best supporting actress Bafta.

After starring in Peter Shaffer’s stage double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith was invited by Olivier to join the nascent National Theatre company in 1962, for whom she appeared in a string of productions, including as Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello in his notorious blackface production in 1964. (Smith repeated the role in Olivier’s film version the following year, for which they were both Oscar-nominated.)

In 1969 she was cast in the lead role of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of the Muriel Spark novel about the Edinburgh schoolteacher with an admiration for Mussolini; Smith went on to win the best actress Oscar in 1970. Later the same year she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theatre in London’s West End; the Evening Standard’s Milton Shulman describer her as “haunt[ing] the stage like some giant portrait by Modigliani, her alabaster skin stretched tight with hidden anguish.”

Another Oscar nomination for best actress came her way in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels with My Aunt, and an Oscar win (for best supporting actress) in 1979 for California Suite, the Neil Simon-scripted anthology piece in which she played an Oscar-nominated film star.

Smith continued her successful parallel film and stage careers in the 1980s. She starred opposite Michael Palin in A Private Function, the postwar comedy about food rationing, co-scripted by Alan Bennett, and had a colourful supporting role as gossipy cousin Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, for which she was nominated for yet another Oscar.

Maggie Smith as Daphne Castle in Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (1982).
Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot. Photo courtesy tumblr

Speaking to the Guardian, Ivory described Smith as “the wittiest woman I ever met in my life. Some of the very funny things she said you would not be able to print.”

Smith followed that film up with The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a character study in which she played the unmarried, frustrated woman of the title. On stage she played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival theatre in Canada, and in 1987 starred as tour guide Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. She also reunited with Bennett for his Talking Heads series on both radio and TV, playing a vicar’s wife having an affair.

Film roles continued to roll in; she starred alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s loosely autobiographical Tea With Mussolini, played a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s country-house murder mystery Gosford Park and acted opposite Judi Dench in Ladies in Lavender, written and directed by Charles Dance. She also accepted the prominent role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, appearing between 2001 and 2011 in every instalment apart from Deathly Hallows Part 1.

In 2002, she appeared in hit comedy-drama Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood; her co-star Ellen Burstyn, now 91, told the Guardian:

“To say she was a great actress doesn’t really say it, she was superior in drama, comedy, all of it and she was so funny. When I worked with her she kept us all laughing the entire time, even when we shouldn’t have been. She was a wonderful woman and a true artist.”

Meanwhile, she achieved arguably her most impactful TV role as the countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes, and reprised the role in two standalone cinema films, released in 2019 and 2022. Having played the role on stage in 1999, Smith enjoyed a late career triumph in The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett’s memoir about a woman who lived on his driveway.

Smith was married twice: to fellow actor Robert Stephens from 1967 to 1975, and to Beverley Cross from 1975 to his death in 1998.

First published at The Guardian, September 28, 2024