Incredibly Versatile, and Incredibly Talented: Dame Maggie Smith, Dead at 89

I first experienced Dame Maggie Smith on screen in the 1969 film “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.” Smith played the sharp-tongued, sarcastically brilliant teacher whose political and libertine views and lifestyle, coupled with the influence it had on her students, come back to bite her. It was an amazingly nuanced part for which Smith won her first Oscar. Smith’s prolific performances on stage, screen, and television have spanned from comedy to drama, from Shakespeare to J.K. Rowling, and from provocative flame to complex sage. Smith has left us a body of work that is rarely matched by her peers and no doubt will remain unmatched by her successors for quite some time.

Dame Maggie Smith has performed on the final stage of her career and is now premiering on the ultimate stage. Smith has died at the age of 89.

We are deeply saddened by the loss of beloved performer of the stage and screen, Dame Maggie Smith.

With a career spanning six decades, her unforgettable contributions will remain nothing short of magical.

THR remembers her here: https://t.co/f4zY0TGYrZ pic.twitter.com/pLBZQ58ieb

— TCM (@tcm) September 27, 2024

Maggie Smith, the prolific, multi-award-winning actor whose work ranged from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie to Harry Potter to Downton Abbey, has died aged 89.

The news was confirmed by her sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement. They said: “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27 September.

“An intensely private person, she was with friends and family at the end. She leaves 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 the Chelsea and Westminster hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days.

“We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”

Saddened to hear Dame Maggie Smith has passed. I had the unforgettable experience of working with her; sharing a two-shot was like being paired with a lion. She could eat anyone alive, and often did. But funny, and great company. And suffered no fools. We will never see another.… pic.twitter.com/wjJCL7FqWf

— Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) September 27, 2024

They’ve been reunited 🤍
Rest in peace to an absolute treasure, Dame Maggie Smith pic.twitter.com/MapPKNAv9v

— Alisha ✨❤️ (@Alishaa___K) September 27, 2024

Nine years after Smith’s win for “Miss Jean Brodie,” she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for “California Suite” (1978). Smith was also nominated for Best Actress one more time for 1972’s “Travels With My Aunt,” and Best Supporting Actress for her roles in “Othello” (1965), “A Room With a View” (1985), and “Gosford Park” (2001). Smith won a Best Actress Tony Award for the 1990 comedy “Lettuce and Lovage.”

Smith’s film and television roles in the late ’90s and 2000s not only showcased Smith’s prodigious talent and expanded her already voluminous career, but they introduced Smith to entirely new generations and made her a pop culture icon: As Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey,” as Professor Minerva McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” film trilogy, and as the irascible, wily, but ultimately motherly Muriel Donnelly in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” were among them. Smith won three Best Supporting Actress Emmy Awards for her role in Downton, although she admitted that she had never watched the series. She won an Outstanding Lead Actress Emmy for her role in the 2002 telepic, “My House in Umbria.”

Dame Maggie Smith was born on December 28, 1934, and christened Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford, a lower-middle-class area of Essex, England. 

She was the youngest of three — her twin brothers, Ian and Alistair, six years older, became architects — and her father was a medical laboratory technician. She studied at the Oxford Playhouse School, making her stage debut in 1952 and working in the thriving revue scene there. 

She moved to America and performed in her first film, Nowhere to Go, in 1958, then appeared in The V.I.P.s (1963), the airport-set drama that starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Her stirring performance as Desdemona in Laurence Olivier’s 1965 movie adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello won Smith her first Oscar nom. Four years later came her Oscar-winning portrayal of an idiosyncratic English schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. (That film was directed by Ronald Neame, whose grandson, Gareth Neame, was an executive producer on Downton.)

In 1989, Smith was awarded the title of “Dame” by Queen Elizabeth II for her dramatic prowess and accomplishments. In 2014, QE II made Smith the 47th member of the Order of Companions of Honor, an honor shared among her contemporaries and friends, Sir Ian McKellen and Dame Judi Dench.

Apparently, the off-screen/stage Smith’s personality reflected characters like Muriel Donnelly and Dowager Grantham. She discussed this tendency in an interview,

Every time I start anything, I think, “This time I’m going to be like Jude [Dench], and it will all be lovely, it will be merry and bright, the Quaker will come out in me.” But, she added, It’s gone too far now to take back. If I suddenly came on like Pollyanna, it wouldn’t work — it would frighten people more if I were nice. They’d be paralyzed with fear. And wonder what I was up to.

In this 2017 interview, Smith discussed why she never watches herself on screen, and her low-key and subdued viewpoint on what is, by any measure, an incredible and storied career. 

RIP, Dame Maggie Smith.