Maggie Smith, the prolific and multi-award-winning actress whose work spans from Miss Jean Brodie’s First to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, has died at the age of 89.
The news was confirmed by his sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement. They said: “She died peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday September 27.
“An intensely private person, she was with her friends and family at the end. She leaves two loving sons and five 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 Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their unwavering care and kindness during his final days.
“We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”
Smith’s gift for tart comedy is arguably responsible for her greatest achievements: the wasp Professor Jean Brodie, for which she won an Oscar, period films like A Room With a View and Gosford Park , and a series of on-stage collaborations. and on screen with Alan Bennett, including The Lady in the Van. “My career has been turbulent,” she told the Guardian in 2004. “I think I’ve been pigeonholed into comedy… If you do comedy, you don’t count at all. Comedy is never seen as the real thing. However, Smith also excelled in non-comedy dramatic roles, starring opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning the Bafta for Best Actress for Judith Hearne’s The Solitary Passion and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s production in 1970 by Hedda Gabler.
Born in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford and began acting at the city’s Playhouse theater as a teenager. While appearing in a series of stage shows, including Bamber Gascoigne’s 1957 musical Share My Lettuce opposite Kenneth Williams, Smith also made forays into film, with his first substantial impact in the thriller Seth Holt’s 1958 Nowhere to Go, for which she was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Bafta. After starring in Peter Shaffer’s double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith was invited by Olivier to join the National Theater’s fledgling company in 1962, for whom she appeared in a series of productions, including as Desdemona as Olivier’s Othello in his famous blackface production in 1964. (Smith repeated the role in Olivier’s film version the following year, for which they both received Academy Award nominations.)
In 1969, she landed the lead role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, the adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel about the Edinburgh schoolteacher who admires Mussolini; Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1970. Later that year, she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theater in London’s West End; Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard described her as “haunting the stage like a giant Modigliani portrait, her alabaster skin taut with hidden anguish”. Another Academy Award nomination for Best Actress came in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels with My Aunt, and an Academy Award win (for Best Supporting Actress) in 1979 for California Suite, the anthology play scripted by Neil Simon in which she played an Oscar winner. -nominated movie star.
Smith successfully pursued parallel careers in film and on stage in the 1980s. She starred opposite Michael Palin in A Private Function, the war comedy about food rationing, co-written by Alan Bennett, and had a colorful supporting role as talkative cousin Charlotte Bartlett in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, for which she was nominated for another Oscar. She followed this up with The Solitary Passion of Judith Hearne, a character study in which Smith played the single, frustrated woman of the title. On stage, she played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival Theater in Canada, and in 1987 she played tour guide Lettice Douffet in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage . She also reunited with Bennett for his radio and television series Talking Heads, playing a vicar’s wife having an affair.
Film roles continued to flow: she starred alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s loosely autobiographical film, Tea With Mussolini, a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s country house murder mystery, Gosford Park, and alongside Judi Dench in Ladies in Lavender, written and directed by Charles Danse. She also took on the important role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, appearing between 2001 and 2011 in every episode except The Deathly Hallows, Part 1. In the meantime, she arguably got her most notable television role as the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes – reprising the role in two independent cinema films, released in 2019 and 2022. Having previously played the role on stage in 1999, Smith enjoyed a late-career triumph in The Lady in the Van, Alan Bennett’s memoir about the woman who lived in his driveway.
Smith was married twice: to fellow actor Robert Stephens between 1967 and 1975, and to Beverley Cross between 1975 and his death in 1998.
