Maggie Smith: the British actress dies at 89

LONDON –

Maggie Smith, the masterful scene-stealing actress who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and won new fans in the 21st century as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall in The Harry Potter films, died on Friday. She was 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 two children and five beloved grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement issued through publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith was frequently called the most notable British actress of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with two Oscars, a handful of Academy Award nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She remained in demand even in her later years, despite her lament that “when you enter the age of grandmothers, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith dryly summarized her later roles as “a gallery of grotesques”, including Professor McGonagall. When asked why he accepted the role, he joked: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the most intelligent actress I’ve ever worked with. You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outwit Maggie Smith.” “. “

“Jean Brodie,” in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, won her the Academy Award for Best Actress and also the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “A Room with a View,” and BAFTA leading actress awards for “A Private Function” in 1984. “A Room with a View.” ” in 1986 and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

Queen Elizabeth II, right, is introduced to Maggie Smith by Laurence Olivier, centre, during the charity premiere of the film Othello, at the Odeon Theater in London, May 2, 1966. Smith died aged 89 . (PA via AP, Archive)

She also received Academy Award nominations for supporting actress in “Othello,” “Travels with My Aunt,” “A Room with a View” and “Gosford Park,” and a BAFTA Award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” . On stage, he won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

Since 2010, she played the acerbic Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the hit period television drama “Downton Abbey,” a role that earned her legions of fans, three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and many other award nominations. . .

But television fame irritated him. When the show ended its run in 2016, Smith said she felt relieved. “It’s freedom,” he told The Associated Press.

“It wasn’t until ‘Downton Abbey’ that I became known or stopped on the street and asked for one of those terrible photographs,” she said.

He continued acting well into his 80s, in films including the 2019 big-screen spinoff “Downton Abbey,” its 2022 sequel “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.” .

Smith had a reputation for being difficult and sometimes overshadowing others.

Actor Billy Connolly, from left, actress Maggie Smith and director Dustin Hoffman pose for a photo on the red carpet at the Elgin Theater for the film “Quartet” during the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival in Toronto on Sunday 9 September 2012. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Aaron Vincent Elkaim.

Richard Burton commented that Smith didn’t just take over a “The VIPs” scene with him: “She commits grand larceny.” However, director Peter Hall found Smith to be “not even remotely difficult unless she’s around idiots. She’s very hard on herself and I don’t think I see any reason why she shouldn’t be hard on other people too.”

Smith admitted he could get impatient at times.

“It’s true that I don’t tolerate fools, but they don’t tolerate me, so I’m irritable,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m pretty good at playing spiky old ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classicist who can italicize a phrase as prosaic as ‘Don’t you have any jam?’ until it sounds like a freshly minted epigram by Coward or Wilde.”

Smith drew laughs with a prosaic line, “This haddock is disgusting,” in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

She reprized the gift of one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when tradition-bound Violet witheringly asked, “What’s a weekend?”

Actress Maggie Smith at a central London cinema in Leicester Square on February 17, 2015. (Photo by Joel Ryan/Invision/AP)

Other actors paid tribute to him on Friday. Hugh Bonneville, who played Smith’s character’s son on “Downton Abbey,” said that “anyone who has shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her keen eye, her sharp wit and her formidable talent.”

“She was a true legend of her generation and will thankfully live on in so many magnificent performances on screen,” he said in a statement.

Rob Lowe, who co-starred with her in “Suddenly, Last Summer,” said the experience was “unforgettable… sharing two takes was like being paired with a lion.”

“He could eat anyone alive, and he did often. But he was great, fun company. And he didn’t suffer fools. We’ll never see another one again. God be with you, Mrs. Smith!” Lowe wrote in X.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer called Smith “a true national treasure whose work will be appreciated for generations to come.”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, in the east end of London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “You went to school, you wanted to act, you started acting, and you keep acting.”

Her father was assigned in 1939 to war duty at Oxford, where her drama studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, at the universities there… If you were smart enough and, I guess, fast enough, you could almost do weekly repeats because all the universities were doing different productions at different times.” he said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in the theater.

Laurence Olivier discovered her talent, invited her to join his original National Theater company and cast her as his co-star in a 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 actor Jeremy Brett said, “It starts out great and then goes out, like a cheese.”

“So the fact that we had just enough time to do it was really an absolute blessing because she was so fresh and so into it,” Bennett said. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a fearsome woman who lived for years in her vehicle at Bennett’s entrance to London.

However flamboyant she may have been on stage or in front of the cameras, Smith was known to be intensely private.

“She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because if she did, she would disappear,” said Simon Callow, who starred with her in “A Room with a View.”

Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knight, in 1990.

She married fellow actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby, who became actors, and divorced in 1975. The same year she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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Hilary Fox in London contributed to this story. Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed biographical material to this obituary before his death in 2018.