Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of all time with oscar winning roles in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to the chilling dowager countess on Downton Abbey, has died on Friday in London. She was 89.
Her death was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. The statement did not specify a cause of death.
Cinema goers barely had heard of her when she starred in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie in 1969, about a teacher at a 1930’s girls school who dared to have progressive social views. It brought her an Academy Award for best actress.
She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for California Suite in 1978, based on a stage comedy.
By the turn of the millennium, she had two Oscars, two Tonys, two Golden Globes, half a dozen Baftas, yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognised until Downton Abbey.
Downton ran for six seasons. Its breakout star was Ms. Smith, playing Lord Grantham’s elderly and stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess. Suddenly, in her mid-70s, Ms. Smith was a megastar.
“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey, ” she said in 2017, adding later: “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with Harry Potter. 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 in 2001 to Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2 in 2011.
Her early films included The V.I.P.s in 1963, a melodrama starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and The Pumpkin Eater a year later, a marital drama written by Harold Pinter.
She won six Evening Standard awards for stage performances, beginning with The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1962.
In the 1980s, Ms. Smith won for Irish author Edna O’Brien’s Virginia in 1981, playing the novelist Virginia Woolf, and for her role as the willful Millamant in The Way of the World in 1984, Congreve’s Restoration comedy about marriage and money.
After a 25-year break, Ms. Smith won for A German Life in 2019, playing the Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels’s longtime secretary.
She appeared in mainstream Hollywood hits, including Sister Act in 1992, as the mother superior trying to tame nightclub singer Whoopi Goldberg, and The First Wives Club in 1996, as a Manhattan divorcée who sympathises with younger women’s travails.
Then there was Robert Altman’s Gosford Park in 2001, set in a 1930s English-country-house weekend and written by Julian Fellowes before he did Downton Abbey.
She won four Emmy Awards. Her first was for HBO’s My House in Umbria in 2003, in which she played a romance novelist, and the other three for “Downton Abbey.”
She 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.
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”.
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?”
