Maggie Smith, the multi-award-winning actor described by her peers as “one of a kind” and possessed of a “sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent”, has died aged 89.
From The Prime of Miss Jean Brody to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, her work has brought her worldwide recognition, two Oscars and eight BAFTAs.
His sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens announced the news: “He passed away peacefully in hospital in the early hours of Friday 27th September.
“An intensely private person, he was with friends and family to the end. He leaves behind two sons and five loving 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 care and immeasurable 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.”
Friends and colleagues paid tribute. American actor Whoopi Goldberg, who worked with Smith on Sister Act, said: “Maggie Smith is a great woman and a great actress. I still can’t believe I was lucky enough to work with a ‘one of a kind’. I offer my deepest condolences to the family.”
Hugh Bonneville, who appeared alongside Smith in Downton Abbey, said: “Anyone who has shared a scene with Maggie will attest to her sharp eye, sharp wit and formidable talent. He is a true legend of his generation and will thankfully live on in many wonderful screen performances. My condolences to his boys and extended family.
Smith was also described as a “really great” actor by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. “She enjoyed writing nuanced, multi-layered, smart, funny and heartbreaking,” he said. “Working with her was the greatest privilege of my career and I will never forget her.”
Her co-star in the play, Michael Dockery, added: “There is no one like Maggie. I feel very lucky to have known such a hero. She will be greatly missed and my thoughts are with her family.
Smith’s gift for acid-tongued comedy was the source of his greatest achievements: The Wasp Teacher Jean Brody, for which he won an Oscar, prime period texts such as A Room View and Gosford Park, and a series of collaborations on stage. and premiered with Alan Bennett, including The Lady in the Van.
“My life has been validated,” he told the Guardian in 2004. “Comedy is never treated as the real thing.
But Smith also excelled in non-comedic dramatic roles, starring opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning a Best Actress BAFTA for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler.
Born in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford and began acting as a teenager at the city’s Playhouse Theatre. Smith also made a foray into film, appearing in a number of stage shows, including Bomber Gascoigne’s 1957 musical comedy Share My Lettuce opposite Kenneth Williams, making his first substantial impact in the 1958 Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go, for which he was nominated. Best Supporting Actress BAFTA
After appearing in Peter Shaffer’s stage double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith was invited by Olivier to join the new National Theater Company in 1962, for whom he played Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello in his worst films. A blackface production in 1964. (Smith reprized the role the following year in Olivier’s film version, for which they were both nominated for an Oscar.)
In 1969 she played the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brady, an adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel about an Edinburgh schoolteacher with an admiration for Mussolini; Smith won the Academy Award for Best Actress in 1970. In the same 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 “ghostly”.[ing] On stage like some giant portrait of Modigliani, his alabaster skin stretched taut with hidden agony.”
She won another Best Actress Oscar in 1973 for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels With My Aunt and in 1979 for the Neil Simon anthology California Suit (Best Supporting Actress). – Nominated Movie Star.
Smith continued her successful parallel film and stage career in the 1980s. She starred opposite Michael Palin in the comedy about food rationing, co-written by Alan Bennett, and in Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View in a colorful supporting role as the gossiping cousin Charlotte Bartlett. Another Oscar nomination.
She followed it up with a character study, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearn, in which Smith played an unmarried, disillusioned woman. On stage she played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival Theater in Canada, and in 1987 played the tour guide Lettice Douffet in Peter Schaffer’s Lettice and Lovage. She reunited for Bennett’s Talking Heads series on both radio and TV, playing a vicar’s wife having an affair.
Film roles followed: the Dowager Countess in Robert Altman’s country-house murder mystery Gosford Park, opposite Joan Bloomright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s biopic Tea with Mussolini. Charles dance. She also took on the lead role of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, appearing in every installment except Deathly Hallows Part 1 between 2001 and 2011.
Meanwhile, she achieved her most impactful television role as the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, created by Gosford Park writer Julian Fellowes – reprising the role in two separate cinema films released in 2019 and 2022. He played the role on stage in 1999. Smith enjoyed a late-career breakthrough with 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 Beverly Cross in 1975 and his death in 1998.
