Maggie Smith Grand Dame of Stage and Screen, Dead at 89

By Anita Gates and Robert Berkvist

The New York Times

 

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 on Friday in London. She was 89.

Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. The statement gave no cause of death.

American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a 1930s girls’ school who dared to have progressive social views — and 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 earned 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 Ms. Smith’s way in the 1950s, when at 20 she won her first Evening Standard Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had two Oscars, two Tonys, 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.”

Ms. Smith on the set of the 1969 film "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie." She won an Academy Award for best actress for her performance. Credit...Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group, via Getty

 Images

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.

After its 2010 British premiere and its 2011 American debut, the show ran six seasons. Its breakout star, from the beginning, was Ms. 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, Ms. Smith was a megastar.

“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” she told Mark Lawson at the B.F.I. and Radio Times Festival in 2017, adding later: “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

Image

Maggie Smith on the set of the 1967 film “The Honey Pot.” Credit...Martin Mills/Getty Images

The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School’s stern but fearless transfiguration teacher, in seven of the eight films, from “Harry Potter: The Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011).

McGonagall, wearing high-necked Victorian-style gowns, a distinctive Scottish brooch, and upswept hair beneath a tall, black witch’s hat, was a striking onscreen presence. Yet Ms. Smith did not find herself constantly pursued in public, except by children.

“A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice,” she recalled on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2015. One boy carefully asked her, “Were you really a cat?”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, England, a town in East London, on Dec. 28, 1934. 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 “Twelfth Night” (1952).

 

The urge to act had always been there. “It’s not even that you particularly want to be an actor,” she once said. “You have to be. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Although Ms. Smith was in her early 20s when she appeared in her first movie (as a party guest in “Child in the House,” a 1956 drama) and made her London stage debut (in “Share My Lettuce,” a 1957 musical revue), it could reasonably be argued that she was never an ingénue.

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. 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.

In “The Honey Pot” (1967), she was Susan Hayward’s nurse companion in a glamorous murder-mystery comedy starring Rex Harrison.

Ms. Smith with Alec McCowen in the 1972 film “Travels With My Aunt,” playing Aunt Augusta from Graham Greene’s novel, an amoral world traveler in her 70s.Credit...Archive Photos/Getty Images

Ms. Smith was just 37 when she starred in “Travels With My Aunt” (1972), playing Aunt Augusta from Graham Greene’s novel, an amoral world traveler in her 70s. (Katharine Hepburn, 68 at the time, had been cast but dropped out because of a disagreement with producers.) New York was never a significant factor.

 After her Broadway debut, as a showgirl in “New Faces of 1956,” Ms. Smith 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), Ms. Smith plays 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.”

She won that year’s Tony for best actress in a play. But Broadway was a blink of the eye compared with the British stage.

In the early 1960s, Ms. 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.)

Ms. Smith starred opposite Laurence Olivier in the film version of “Othello” (1965), bringing her the first of her six Oscar nominations.Credit...Warner Brothers

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), the director Ingmar Bergman’s first production outside Scandinavia. In the 1980s, Ms. Smith won for Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia” (1981), playing the novelist Virginia Woolf, and for her role as the willful Millamant in “The Way of the World” (1984), Congreve’s Restoration comedy about marriage and money. 

In 1994, Ms. Smith won for Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women,” playing the oldest of the title characters. 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, Ms. Smith won for “A German Life” (2019), playing the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s longtime secretary.

“What Smith captures brilliantly,” Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian, wrote, “is the way, in old age, the vagueness of memory coexists with moments of piercing clarity.”

Ms. Smith spent three seasons at the Stratford Festival in Canada, taking on a rich assortment of roles, including Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and — in “Richard III” — a 15th-century queen of England.

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.

The rest of the time, Ms. 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 the film critic Barry Norman in a 1993 television interview. She added, “I can’t remember when I last appeared in modern dress.” 

Ms. Smith played a suspicious, overprotective chaperone accompanying a young woman to Florence in “A Room with a View” (1968).Credit...Merchant-Ivory Productions

In turn-of-the-century films, she played a suspicious, overprotective chaperone, accompanying a young woman to Florence in Italy in Merchant Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985); an unfeeling housekeeper at a Yorkshire mansion in “The Secret Garden” (1993); a dramatic New York auntie in “Washington Square” (1997); and a stylish Londoner who fancies the new priest (Michael Palin) in “The Missionary” (1982).

In “Quartet” (1981), Ms. Smith was an artsy British expatriate in 1920s Paris. (In a 2012 film of the same name, she played a retired opera diva.)

The 1930s must have felt like home. Both her Agatha Christie pictures, featuring the master detective Hercule Poirot, were set in that decade. In “Death on the Nile” (1978), she was the nurse companion of a kleptomaniac (Bette Davis). In “Evil Under the Sun” (1982), she is a saucy Adriatic-island hotelier.

Kelly MacDonald and Ms. Smith in a scene from Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park" (2001).Credit...Mark Tillie/Usa Films 

“Murder by Death” (1976), Neil Simon’s Hollywood-detectives parody, was set in a make-believe 1930s (the clothes and the cars) that somehow included informed references to television, World War II, and Humphrey Bogart movies that hadn’t been made yet. Dick (David Niven) and Nora Charleston (Ms. Smith), like Nick and Nora Charles of “The Thin Man,” doted on a wire-haired fox terrier and multiple daily martinis.  

Then there was Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001), set in a 1930s English country house weekend and written by Julian Fellowes (before he did “Downton Abbey”). Ms. Smith was a marcel-waved countess who, much like Violet Crawley, had a gift for lethal put-downs. When a visiting Hollywood producer pleasantly declines to reveal the ending of his next movie for fear of spoiling it for his dinner companions, the countess responds just as pleasantly, “Oh, but none of us will see it.”

In “Tea With Mussolini” (1999), Ms. Smith was part of an expatriate quintet having lovely lunches in Florence as Italy fell to fascism. “A Private Function” (1984), a comedy with Mr. Palin, took place just after the war. “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” (1987), a drama about a shy spinster, was set in the 1950s.

Ms. Smith wears 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), Ms. Smith was Betsey Trotwood, a grouchy but loving Georgian-Regency great-aunt. (Daniel Radcliffe, age 10, played Copperfield.)

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, and the other three for “Downton Abbey.”

Her final films included “The Lady in the Van” (2015), playing a strong-willed homeless woman, and “A Boy Called Christmas” (2021). 

In 1967, Ms. 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, the 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.

Ms. Smith 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.

Image

Ms. Smith in 2015. “What Smith captures brilliantly,” wrote a critic for The Guardian, “is the way, in old age, the vagueness of memory coexists with moments of piercing clarity.”Credit...Tom Jamieson for The New York Times

Ms. Smith disliked watching her own performances. As recently as 2020, she said she had still never seen an episode of “Downton Abbey” — “It got to the point where it was too late to catch up” — not to mention the feature films the series inspired. The second, “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022), introduced the Granthams to both Hollywood and the French Riviera.

Behind the quick wit, though, lay the heart of an introvert. On CBS’s “60 Minutes” in 2013, when it was suggested that she had no interest in celebrity, Ms. Smith said: “Absolutely none. I mean, why would I?” 

She had long described herself as painfully shy. Much earlier, in a 1979 interview with The Times, she confessed, “I’m always very relieved to be somebody else because I’m not sure at all who I am or what indeed my personality is.”

In the 2018 documentary “Tea With the Dames,” an interviewer asked Ms. Smith if the first days on a movie set were still scary for her.

“All days are scary,” she said.