Sharp-tonguedindomitableand beloved actress Dame Maggie Smith dies at 89
OscarEmmyand Tony-winning actor Maggie Smith played everything from wistful ingenues in Shakespeare to Harry Potter's Prof. McGonagall and the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey. She died Friday at age 89. Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP hide caption
Dame Maggie Smith – whose acting career spanned seven decades and traversed the stage and screen – has died at age 89. She passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends on Friday morningher publicist confirmed.
Smith was once so slender and delicate as Desdemona that Laurence Olivier's Othello could easily smother her with a pillow. By the end of her careerno one would've dared try.
Though she was fine-featured and stood barely five-foot-fivecasting directors realized early-on that her characters would inevitably appear indomitablewhether she was bristling with epithets in Shawcasting spells as Harry Potter's Professor McGonagallor silencing opposition with sideways glances as Downton Abbey's formidable Lady Violet.
Act One: Precise diction in her prime
What Maggie Smith learned about holding audiences raptshe learned early. She arrived on the professional stage in her teensand graduated quickly to Britain's National Theaterthe West End and Broadwaywhere her precise diction proved ideal for delivering the barbs of restoration comedyand the epigrams of Noel Coward. Let her play the sort of chatterbox that George Bernard Shaw wrote in The Millionairess, and it was sometimes hard for her co-stars to get a word in edgewise.
Almost as nonstop was the title role that won her a Best Actress Oscar in 1970 — her deluded teacher at a Scottish girls' school in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.
"Give me a gherll at an impressionable age," she purred"and she is mine for life."
The character was notin factin her primebut Smith most definitely was. In the next eight yearsshe starred in six filmsincluding Travels With My Aunt and Death on the Nile, triumphed on TV in everything from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice to The Carol Burnett Showand on stageheld title roles from Hedda Gabler to Peter Pan.
Maggie Smith in February 1969. Roy Jones/Hulton Archive/Getty Images hide caption
All of this before winning another Oscar in Neil Simon's California Suitefor playing multiple characters including a conniving actress who is herself up for an Oscarand who practices a delicioushammily self-deprecating acceptance speech at one pointsaying she doesn't want to "sob all over Burt Reynolds."
No sobs in Smith's actual acceptance speech at the Oscars. She thanked her writerdirector and co-star.
Act Two: Best exotic rolessome written just for her
All of this was well before a sort of second act in Smith's career that found her prim and proper as a chaperone in A Room with a Viewprimly comic as the mother superior in Sister Act with Whoopi Goldbergcranky in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel moviescrankier still as the woman who came to stay in Alan Bennett's driveway in The Lady in the Vanand downright viperish as mother to Ian McKellen's King in Shakespeare's Richard III.
Though he'd been slaughtering all comers for most of the movie at that pointthere was such venom in her declaration that he was "proudsubtlesly and bloody," that McKellen looked shaken. As well he might.
Contemporary playwrights had also taken note. Peter Shafferthe author of Amadeus and Equusremembered he was once asked by Smith at a party why he kept writing plays about two men talking. He responded by going home and writing Lettice and Lovage specifically for herabout an extravagantly over-imaginative tour guide "to celebrate her glee and glitter and perfect timing," he told interviewers. "And above all wit — her presence is witty. "
Act Three: From Harry Potter to Downton
And then Smith's career — for which she'd been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empireand later a Dame and a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor — had a third act. One in which her fame grew out of all proportion to what she'd known before. Children recognized her on the street from the Harry Potter movies (she was in all but one of them).
Maggie Smith as VioletDowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey. Nick Briggs/PBS hide caption
And while she was casting spells on kidstheir parents and grandparents awaited her every utterance on TV's Downton Abbeywhere for six seasonsshe brought a capricious sense of humor to the sort of woman she never was in real life — aloofentitledun-diplomaticimpatientargumentativehideboundand so thoroughly winningaudiences couldn't get enough of her.
Thatat leastLady Violet had in common with the woman who played her. Maggie Smith left audiences craving more of her presence for seven decadesthough she worked so constantly that the dowager countess' most famously clueless question — "what is a weekend?" — might almost have been her own.