In a career that began in the 1950s, Maggie Smith played a wide variety of roles, from Desdemona to Miss Jean Brodie, Virginia Woolf, and Minerva McGonagall.
Maggie Smith, the prolific and multi-award-winning actor known for her performances in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Harry Potter, and Downton Abbey, has passed away at the age of 89.
Her sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, confirmed the news in a statement, saying, “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27 September.”
“An intensely private person, she was surrounded by friends and family in her final moments. She leaves behind two sons and five loving grandchildren, all of whom are heartbroken by the loss of their extraordinary mother and grandmother.”
They continued: “We would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to the wonderful staff at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital for their care and unwavering kindness during her last days.”
The family added: “We appreciate all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy during this difficult time.”
Smith’s sharp wit and talent for delivering biting comedic lines were central to some of her most celebrated performances.
She won an Oscar for playing the acerbic teacher Jean Brodie, starred in genteel period pieces like A Room with a View and Gosford Park, and formed a long-standing partnership with playwright Alan Bennett, which included The Lady in the Van.
“My career is patchy,” Smith remarked in 2004. “I think I was typecast as a comic actress… Comedy doesn’t really count, you see. It’s never considered serious acting.” Despite this, Smith thrived in dramatic roles, too.
She performed alongside Laurence Olivier at the National Theatre, earned a BAFTA for *The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne*, and took on the lead role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of *Hedda Gabler*.
Born in 1934, Maggie Smith was raised in Oxford, where she began her acting career as a teenager at the Playhouse Theatre.
In addition to her stage work, Smith started appearing in films, with her first notable role in Seth Holt’s 1958 thriller Nowhere to Go, which earned her a BAFTA nomination for Best Supporting Actress.
After playing in Peter Shaffer’s stage double bill, The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith caught the attention of Laurence Olivier, who invited her to join the newly established National Theatre company in 1962.
Among her many roles there, she portrayed Desdemona opposite Olivier’s Othello in his controversial 1964 blackface production, a role she later reprised for the film adaptation, earning both of them Oscar nominations.
In 1969, Smith took on the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, an adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel about a schoolteacher in Edinburgh with a soft spot for Mussolini. Her performance won her the Best Actress Oscar in 1970.
That same year, she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theatre in London’s West End.
Milton Shulman of the Evening Standard wrote that Smith “haunts the stage like a towering portrait by Modigliani, her alabaster skin taut with suppressed anguish.”
In 1973, Smith received another Oscar nomination, this time for her role in the adaptation of Graham Greene’s Travels with My Aunt, and in 1979, she won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Neil Simon’s California Suite, where she portrayed an Oscar-nominated actress.
Smith continued her dual success on stage and screen throughout the 1980s.
She starred alongside Michael Palin in A Private Function, a wartime comedy co-written by Alan Bennett about food rationing, and had a notable supporting role as Charlotte Bartlett, the gossiping cousin, in Merchant Ivory’s A Room with a View, which earned her yet another Oscar nomination.
She followed this with a powerful performance in The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a study of an unmarried, emotionally stifled woman.
On stage, Smith played Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 play at the Stratford Festival Theatre in Canada, and in 1987, she took on the role of Lettice Douffet, an eccentric tour guide, in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage.
She also re-teamed with Alan Bennett for his Talking Heads series on both radio and television, portraying a vicar’s wife involved in an affair.
Smith’s film career continued to flourish in the 1990s and 2000s. She appeared alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s semi-autobiographical film Tea with Mussolini, and played a grand dowager countess in Robert Altman’s country-house murder mystery Gosford Park.
Smith also shared the screen with Judi Dench in Ladies in Lavender, written and directed by Charles Dance.
In the 2000s, she embraced a new generation of fans through her portrayal of Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter films, a role she played in all but one of the films from 2001 to 2011.
She also made a significant impact on television as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey, written by Gosford Park creator Julian Fellowes. Smith reprised this role in two feature-length films released in 2019 and 2022.
In a late-career triumph, Smith brought her stage role from 1999 to the screen in Alan Bennett’s The Lady in the Van, a poignant story about a woman living in a van on his driveway.
Smith was married twice, first to fellow actor Robert Stephens from 1967 to 1975, and later to playwright Beverley Cross from 1975 until his death in 1998.
