Dame Maggie Smith: Oscar-winning Harry Potter and Downton Abbey star dies, aged 89
Giant of stage and screen was one of Britain’s most successul stars
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Louise Thomas
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Dame Maggie Smith, the beloved British star of stage and screen, has died, aged 89.
Tributes are pouring in from the world of entertainment after Smith’s death was announced on Friday (27 September) by her sons Toby Stephens and Chris Larkin, who said: “It is with great sadness we have to announce the death of Dame Maggie Smith. She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning.
“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.”
Popular with audiences for more than 60 years, Smith gave life to a host of memorable characters, from Muriel Spark’s passionate Edinburgh girls’ school teacher Jean Brodie, in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, to Professor Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter series and Violet Crawley in ITV drama Downton Abbey.
Her other film hits include the Sister Act franchise and Steven Spielberg’s Hook.
Over her career, Smith worked with theatrical greats including Sir Laurence Olivier, Sir John Gielgud, Alan Bennett and Dame Judi Dench, while maintaining a prolific film and television presence from the 1960s onwards.
The actor was born Margaret Natalie Smith on 28 December 1934 in Ilford, Essex, the youngest child of Nathaniel Smith, a pathologist and laboratory technician from Newcastle upon Tyne, and Margaret Hutton, a Glaswegian secretary, who had fallen in love after meeting on a train to London.
The family relocated to Oxford when their daughter was four. She soon won a scholarship to Oxford High School and, despite a frustrating failure to win parts in school plays – because she was considered “too common”, Smith later alleged – quickly resolved to become an actress, just as her elder twin brothers Alistair and Ian had decided equally emphatically to dedicate themselves to careers in architecture.
In 1952, when she was 17, she took a job as an assistant stage manager at the Oxford Playhouse, which she later complained had amounted to little more than “making endless cups of tea and playing maids” but which had also seen her make her debut as Viola in Twelfth Night before appearing in such plays as Cinderella, Rookery Nook, Housemaster, W Somerset Maugham’s Cakes and Ale and The Letter and Nikolai Gogol’s The Government Inspector.
In 1956, she went to New York City to make her Broadway debut playing several parts in the revue New Faces of ’56 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre before returning to London the following year to star in the musical comedy Share My Lettuce.
Here she played opposite Kenneth Williams, who would remain a lifelong friend with whom she would appear again, to award-winning effect, in the Peter Shaffer two-parter The Private Ear and the Public Eye at The Globe in 1962.
“She is so singular, a unique actress,” Williams would later say of his co-star, praising her hard work in rehearsals and remembering with particular relish a sketch in which she had played a hostess encouraging her guests to join in a round of party games while artfully swinging a string of beads around her neck and midriff and back again without losing them, a trick only mastered through hours of practice.
Her real stage breakthrough arrived that same year when she was invited by Lord Olivier to join his company at the National Theatre, Sir Laurence having been impressed after seeing her in William Congreve’s The Double-Dealer at The Old Vic, where she had also completed a trio of Shakespeare plays.
She would stay at the National for eight years, enjoying a remarkable run from 1963 to 1965 in particular when she starred in George Farquhar’s The Recruiting Officer, played Desdemona in Othello and appeared in Henrik Ibsen’s Master Builder, Noel Coward’s Hay Fever and Much Ado About Nothing.
However, her relationship with Sir Laurence was often tense and in danger of boiling over into outright rivalry. She later revealed that he had once slapped her in a rehearsal for Othello and criticised her diction, to which she pointedly replied in perfectly crisp vowels, having waited until he was in makeup to play the Moor: “How now, brown cow?”
Nevertheless, the 1965 film version, which gave screen debuts to future knights Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi, secured Oscar nominations for both of its stars.
Prior to that, Smith had made her uncredited movie debut in Child in the House (1956) but was Bafta-nominated for her first screen role proper, Nowhere to Go (1958), an atypical Ealing crime drama.
Her other screen appearances in the 1960s included roles in the comedy Go to Blazes and Jack Clayton’s adaptation of Penelope Mortimer’s The Pumpkin-Eater (both 1962), the Terence Rattigan-penned The VIPs (1963), Jack Cardiff’s Sean O’Casey biopic Young Cassidy and the American capers The Honey Pot (1967) and Hot Millions (1968), the former directed by Joseph L Mankiewicz and starring Rex Harrison.
She was part of the impressive ensemble cast of Richard Attenborough’s satirical musical O What a Lovely War! in 1969, the same year in which she played the title role in Ronald Neame’s film of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a part that would define her in the public imagination forever afterwards.
Smith was perfectly cast as Spark’s imperious, influential teacher, whose pupils idolise her, not always wisely, and may have taken inspiration from her own mother, at least in accent. She was rewarded with the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance and would appear in another Spark adaptation, Memento Mori, in 1992.
Smith married during this period, wedding fellow actor Robert Stephens on 29 June 1967, with whom she would go on to have two sons: Chris Larkin (born 1967) and Toby Stephens (1969). They too would grow up to join the family business.
After starring in Farquhar’s The Beaux’ Stratagem and the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s London production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabbler in 1970, she picked up another Academy Award nomination for her work in the veteran George Cukor’s Travels with My Aunt (1972) and appeared in Alan J Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing (1973).
Smith subsequently played Peter Pan at the London Coliseum before returning to Broadway in 1975 to play opposite her husband in Coward’s Private Lives, directed by Sir John Gielgud. The stormy relationship between the central characters all too closely echoed that between Smith and Stephens and they would separate that same year.
She was quickly remarried to the playwright Beverley Cross on 23 June 1975. The pair moved to Canada, collaborating on a string of productions at Ontario’s Stratford Shakespeare Festival (1976-80) and remained together until his death in 1998.
Her other films of the 1970s included two by Neil Simon, the ensemble whodunit spoof Murder By Death (1976) and California Suite (1978), for which she won her second and final Oscar, this time named Best Supporting Actress. She also appeared in the Agatha Christie adaptation Death on the Nile (1978) and returned for a follow-up four years later, Evil Under the Sun (1982), both of which starred Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot.
In between, she made Quartet (1981), inspired by Jean Rhys’s novel of the same name, and played Thetis in Clash of the Titans (1981), remembered for Ray Harryhausen’s celebrated stop-motion effects.
The mid-1980s brought Smith’s first screen collaborations with her friends Alan Bennett and Dame Judi Dench: she appeared in A Private Function (1984) scripted by the former and starred with the latter in the Merchant Ivory production of EM Forster’s A Room with a View (1985), securing a fifth Oscar nomination for her turn as Charlotte Bartlett.
She would later triumph in a celebrated 1988 instalment of Bennett’s television monologues Talking Heads (“A Bed Among the Lentils”) and on both stage and screen as Miss Shepherd in his The Lady in the Van . She would appear with Dench in Tea with Mussolini (1999), David Hare’s play The Breath of Life (2002), Ladies in Lavender (2004) and The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its 2015 sequel.
The early 1990s saw Smith make a number of memorable appearances in hit American films, from playing the older Wendy Darling in Steven Spielberg’s Hook (1991) to her role as a disapproving Mother Superior opposite Whoopi Goldberg’s undercover lounge singer in Sister Act (1992).
Further literary adaptations followed, including roles in The Secret Garden (1993), Richard Loncraine’s Second World War-set Richard III (1995) opposite Ian McKellen and films of Henry James’s Washington Square (1997) and Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September (1999), as well as altogether camper fare such as The First Wives Club (1996) supporting Diane Keaton, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn.
Television provided an additional showcase for her talents in her later years and she appeared in a famed American broadcast of Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly, Last Summer (1993) a BBC dramatisation of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1999) and the TV films My House in Umbria (2003) and Capturing Mary (2007).
The turn of the new millennium saw Smith step into another role with which she would be closely associated thereafter and which would introduce her to a younger generation of film-goers.
She first donned a witches’ hat to play Minerva McGonagall, the strict but kindly transfiguration instructor and deputy headmistress of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, in Chris Columbus’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 and would reprise the role in six more films in that blockbuster franchise, based on JK Rowling’s best-selling novels.
She would later recount meetings with young fans, who would inquire suspiciously whether she had really turned into a cat.
That same year, she was in scene-stealing form in Robert Altman’s English country house drama Gosford Park, picking up her final Academy Award nod and finding another important collaborator in Julian Fellowes, who would soon write her another plum part as the vinegary Lady Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in the popular television series Downton Abbey (2010-15).
Asked by chat show host Graham Norton whether she was glad the series was coming to an end in 2015, Smith answered, without a moment’s hesitation: “Oh yeah! No, I really am. Honestly, by the time we finished she must have been 110 so I couldn’t go on and on!”
Asked whether she had ever actually seen an episode of Downton, she replied, rather more guiltily: “I’ve got the box set...”
A giant of theatre and a deft character player on film, extremely committed and rarely out of work, Dame Maggie was nevertheless something of a perennial outsider, despite the adulation she received throughout her career, having acquired a reputation as rather spiky and acid-tongued, disinclined to suffer fools gladly.
On whether she had ever felt inclined to try to correct this perception, she told an audience at London’s Tricycle Theatre in March 2017: “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 paralysed with fear. And wonder what I was up to. But perhaps I should try it… ‘Hello! What fun! We’re going to be here all day! And then filming all night too! Goodie! And it’s so lovely and cold!’”
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