Maggie Smith, Legendary British Actress of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

Dame Maggie Smith, the Tony-, Emmy- and Academy Award-winning actress who was among the most recognizable British talents of stage and screen, has died in London at the age of 89. She was known for such wide-ranging roles as the title character in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter films and Violet Crawley, The Dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey among many others. 

Her death was announced 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."

As a young actor, Smith typified the witty, willowy picture of a tremendously talented actress more at home in her characters than herself. Yet as she grew to become an elder statesman of British acting, she epitomized “a savory stereotype of English drama and fiction,” Charles Isherwood wrote in The New York Times: “The imperious gentlewoman so secure in her sense of place in the social sphere (cozily near the apex, of course) that she regards the passing scene with bemused distance, as if through a lorgnette from the private opera box she carries around with her.”

Smith, never really taking to the bustle of Broadway, appeared in London's West End far more frequently. In America, she was recognized often for her film roles—joining an echelon of British performers who could exert box-office clout on both sides of the Atlantic—while, in Britain, she maintained her primary status as a stage actress. She appeared in nearly 100 major British productions across her career, making her stage debut in a 1952 production of Twelfth Night at the Oxford Playhouse and becoming a fixture of the Royal National Theatre in the 1960s, earning acclaim in productions like Othello (1964), The Master Builder (1964), Much Ado About Nothing (1965), Miss Julie (1966) and Black Comedy (1966). 

Born in Essex, England in 1934, Smith grew up in Oxford, attended high school there and—while she credited no childhood experience as compelling her to pursue theater—studied drama at the Oxford Playhouse and Oxford University Dramatic Society. After school, she appeared in On the Fringe at the Edinburgh Festival, where she was scouted as a part of Leonard Sillman’s New Faces of 1956 revue, making her Broadway debut when the variety show opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre. "I think Leonard was under this mad illusion that I could sing," she once joked.

Smith earned many accolades for her screen roles—including being made Dame by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. She received two Academy Awards, for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969) and California Suite (1978), and received Oscar nominations for Othello (1965), Travels with My Aunt (1972), A Room with a View (1985) and Gosford Park (2001). Memorably, Smith played Professor McGonagall in the Harry Potter franchise, bringing new generations of young people from around the world closer to her legacy. She was nominated for an Emmy five times for her work as the dowager Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey, winning three. Prior, she won an Emmy for My House in Umbria (2003) and was nominated for Capturing Mary (2007), David Copperfield (1999) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1993). 

After making her New York stage debut in Sillman's 1956 revue, Smith did not return to Broadway until 1975, when she played Amanda Prynne in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, transferring the production from London. “She is something to be gowned, lighted and gaped at: not so much the center of attention as its whole field of reference,” wrote Walter Kerr in his review. Smith earned a Tony nomination for that role, and appeared on Broadway again, earning an additional nomination for Night and Day (1979), playing a manic personality who careens from character to character and whose transient persona dramatized the aesthetics and language of reportage. “Miss Smith is, all by her many selves, what an old vaudevillian would call a class act,” Kerr wrote in The New York Times. 

Smith appeared on Broadway a final time in 1990, reprising her Olivier-nominated London turn in Lettice and Lovage, finally earning a Tony Award and returning to her vaudevillian roots in Peter Shaffer's comedy about a failing history tour guide caught in romantic fancy. “Mr. Shaffer's play, his first out-and-out comedy since Black Comedy in 1964, is a slight if harmless confection that at first matches Miss Smith's bracing energy but by Act III must be bolstered by it,” wrote Kerr in his review in The New York Times. “The jig would be up far earlier in the evening if anyone were so stupid as to ask the star to sit still.”

Her last credited stage/screen performance was in Christopher Hampton's "A German Life" (2019) at London's Bridge Theatre, as a woman who worked in Joseph Goebbels’ ministry of propaganda during World War II.

Despite her often energetic and bracingly comedic turns on stage, Smith was known for her intense privacy, often steering away from the public eye and embracing her discomfort out of character. “The time on stage is easier than the rest of one's existence. At least for those two and a half hours you can be quite sure who you are,” she once said in an interview. “The rest of the time I find very confusing. I'm always very relieved to be somebody else, because I'm not sure at all who I am or what indeed my personality is. I feel like a person who doesn't exist until I'm somebody else.”

“Acting,” she added simply, “is what I do. One is nervous every single time, to go on a stage at all. But it's the only way I've lived. I've never been in a position to question it. It is my work."