Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and traversed the stage and screen – has died at age 89. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Friday morning, her publicist confirmed.
Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier’s Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her career, no one would’ve dared try.
Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-five, casting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitable, whether she was bristling with epithets in Shaw, casting spells as Harry Potter’s Professor McGonagall, or silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey’s formidable Lady Violet.
Act One: Precise diction in her prime
What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences rapt, she learned early. She arrived on the professional stage in her teens, and graduated quickly to Britain’s National Theater, the West End and Broadway, where her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of restoration comedy, and the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.
Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 — her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls’ school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
“Give me a gherll at an impressionable age,” she purred, “and she is mine for life.”
The character was not, in fact, in her prime, but Smith most definitely was. In the next eight years, she starred in six films, including Travels With My Aunt and Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Show, and on stage, held title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.
All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon’s California Suite, for playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscar, and who practices a delicious, hammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one point, saying she doesn’t want to “sob all over Burt Reynolds.”
No sobs in Smith’s actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writer, director and co-star.
Act Two: Best exotic roles, some written just for her
All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith’s career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in A Room with a View, primly comic as the mother superior in Sister Act with Whoopi Goldberg, cranky in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel movies, crankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett’s driveway in The Lady in the Van, and downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen’s King in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
Though he’d been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that point, there was such venom in her declaration that he was “proud, subtle, sly and bloody,” that McKellen looked shaken. As well he might.
Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shaffer, the author of Amadeus and Equus, remembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and Lovage specifically for her, about an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide “to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing,” he told interviewers. “And above all wit — her presence is witty. “
Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton
And then Smith’s career — for which she’d been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire, and later a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor — had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she’d known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).
And while she was casting spells on kids, their parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV’s Downton Abbey, where for six seasons, she brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloof, entitled, un-diplomatic, impatient, argumentative, hidebound, and so thoroughly winning, audiences couldn’t get enough of her.
That, at least, Lady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decades, though she worked so constantly that the dowager countess’ most famously clueless question — “what is a weekend?” — might almost have been her own.
