Maggie Smith, actress who stole the scene in Harry Potter and ‘Downton Abbey,’ dies at 89

By JILL LAWLESS Associated Press

LONDON (AP) — Maggie Smith, the masterful actress and scene-stealer who won an Oscar for the 1969 film “Miss Jean Brodie’s First” and won new fans in the 21st century as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in “Downton Abbey” and Professor Minerva McGonagall, in the Harry Potter films, died Friday at the age of 89.

Smith’s sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, said in a statement that Smith died early Friday in a London hospital.

“She leaves two beloved sons and five grandchildren who are devastated by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother,” they said in a statement released by publicist Clair Dobbs.

Smith has often been considered the most prominent British female performer of a generation that included Vanessa Redgrave and Judi Dench, with a string of Oscar nominations and a shelf full of acting trophies.

She remained in high demand even in her later years, despite her laments that “when you enter the era of grandmothers, you’re lucky to get anything.”

Smith dryly summarized his later roles as “a gallery of grotesques”, including Professor McGonagall. When asked why she took on the role, she joked: “Harry Potter is my pension.”

Richard Eyre, who directed Smith in a television production of “Suddenly Last Summer,” said she was “intellectually the most intelligent actress I’ve ever worked with.” You have to get up very, very early in the morning to outsmart Maggie Smith.

“Jean Brodie”, in which she played a dangerously charismatic Edinburgh schoolteacher, won her the Oscar for best actress as well as the British Academy Film Award (BAFTA).

Smith added a supporting actress Oscar for “California Suite” in 1978, Golden Globes for “California Suite” and “Room with a View,” and BAFTAs for leading actress in “A Private Function” in 1984, “A Room with a View.” in 1986, and “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” in 1988.

She also received Academy Award nominations as a supporting actress in “Othello”, “Travels with My Aunt”, “Room with a View” and “Gosford Park”, as well as a BAFTA award for supporting actress in “Tea with Mussolini.” On stage, she won a Tony in 1990 for “Lettice and Lovage.”

Beginning in 2010, she played Violet Crawley, the acid-tongued Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the hit television drama “Downton Abbey,” a role that earned her legions of fans three Emmy Awards, a Golden Globe and a host of other nominations. .

She continued acting well into her 80s, in films such as the 2022 big screen spinoff “Downton Abbey: A New Era” and the 2023 release “The Miracle Club.”

Smith had a reputation for being difficult and sometimes overshadowing others.

Richard Burton noted that Smith didn’t just repeat a scene from “The VIPs” with him: “She commits grand larceny. However, director Peter Hall felt that Smith was not “difficult at all unless she was among the idiots”. She’s very hard on herself and I don’t think she sees a reason why she shouldn’t be hard on others as well.

Smith admitted that she can be impatient at times.

“It’s true that I don’t tolerate fools, but they don’t tolerate me, so I’m nervous,” Smith said. “Maybe that’s why I’m pretty good at playing spiky older ladies.”

Critic Frank Rich, in a New York Times review of “Lettice and Lovage,” praised Smith as “the stylized classic who can italicize a phrase as prosaic as ‘Have you no marmalade?’ until it seems like a freshly minted epigram from Coward or Wilde.

Smith drew laughs from a prosaic line – “That haddock is disgusting” – in a 1964 revival of Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever.”

“But unfortunately, the critics talked about it, and after that, we never laughed about it,” she recalls. “As soon as you say something funny, it’s more talkative. It’s really gone.

She repeated the gift for one-liners in “Downton Abbey,” when tradition-bound Violet acidly asked, “What’s a weekend?”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, east London, on December 28, 1934. She summed up her life briefly: “We went to school, we wanted to play, we started playing, we still play . »

Her father was posted to war service at Oxford in 1939, where her drama studies at the Oxford Playhouse School led to a busy apprenticeship.

“I did so many things, you know, at the universities there. … If you were smart enough and, I suppose, quick enough, you could almost do a weekly performance because all the colleges were doing different productions at different times,” she said in a BBC interview.

She took Maggie as her stage name because another Margaret Smith was active in theater.

Laurence Olivier spotted her talent, invited her to be part of his original National Theater company and cast her as co-star in a 1965 film adaptation of “Othello”.

Smith said two directors, Ingmar Bergman and William Gaskill, both featured in National Theater productions, were important influences.

Alan Bennett, preparing to film the monologue “A Bed Among the Lentils,” said he was wary of Smith’s reputation for boredom. As actor Jeremy Brett says, “It starts out divine and then goes away, a bit like cheese.”

“So the fact that we just had enough time to do it was really an absolute blessing because she was so fresh and so interested,” Bennett said. He also wrote a starring role for Smith in “The Lady in the Van,” as Miss Shepherd, a formidable woman who lived for years in her vehicle in Bennett’s London driveway.

As extravagant as she may have been on stage or in front of the cameras, Smith was known for being intensely private.

Simon Callow, who starred with her in “A Room with a View,” said he ruined their first meeting by throwing compliments at her.

“I blurted out all kinds of crap about her and she kind of backed out. She doesn’t like that stuff much,” Callow said in a film portrait of the actress. “She never wanted to talk about acting. Acting was something she was terrified to talk about because that if she did, it would go away.

Smith was made a Dame Commander of the British Empire, the equivalent of a knighthood, in 1990.

She married the actor Robert Stephens in 1967. They had two sons, Christopher and Toby – both of whom grew up to become actors – and divorced in 1975. The same year, she married the writer Beverley Cross, who died in 1998.

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Hilary Fox in London contributed. Associated Press writer Robert Barr contributed to this obituary before his death in 2018.