Dame Maggie Smith, internationally beloved British star of the stage and screen, has died at the age of 89.
During her decades-long career, Smith won two Academy Awards, five BAFTAs, four Emmys, one Tony Award, three Golden Globes, five Screen Actors Guild Awards, and six Evening Standard Theatre Awards.
The news was confirmed by sons Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens in a statement, saying: “She passed away peacefully in hospital early this morning, Friday 27th September. 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.”
Smith began her prolific stage career in 1952 while still a student at the Oxford University Dramatic Society. She made her debut on Broadway in “New Faces of ’56” and continued to work for Britain’s National Theatre Company and the Royal Shakespeare Company in the decades that followed.
The actress had a famous rivalry with fellow stage star Laurence Olivier when the two worked together at the Royal National Theatre. In 2015, Smith admitted on “The Graham Norton Show” that the actor once slapped her across the face while the pair worked on a production of “Othello” in 1964.
In 2018, she also said that Olivier made it a point to criticize her acting often, and that after the actor said her slow line delivery “bored him off the stage” one night, she spent the next performance going “so fast he didn’t know if it was Wednesday or Christmas … I got him really rattled.”
“I think I was more nervous of Laurence than of the critics,” she added. “As indeed everybody was … we were terrified.”
Smith also made her cinematic debut in 1956 when she earned an uncredited role in “Child in the House.” Her first screen credit was 1959’s “Nowhere to Go,” for which she earned her first British Academy Film Award award.
It was 1969’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” that catapulted Smith to international acclaim. She was awarded the Academy Award for Best Actress, though was unable to attend the ceremony, and her award was accepted for her by Alice Ghostley. She would go on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress in 1978 for “California Suite.”
She went on to balance stage and film work throughout the 1960s and 1970s and was regularly toasted and awarded for her efforts. Her stage work included Ingmar Bergman’s “Hedda Gabler” and the comedy “Private Lives.” Her films from the era included “Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing,” “Death on the Nile,” and “California Suite.”
Smith continued to cement herself as a force in North America and Europe throughout the 1980s. Her role as Mrs. Silly in “All for Love” earned her the first of several BAFTA Best Actress nominations. She also played Virginia Woolf in 1981’s “Virginia,” a move that earned yet another Evening Standard Theatre Award.
Her portrayal of Charlotte Bartlett in “A Room with a View” in 1985 earned her a fifth Academy Award nomination.
In the 1990s Smith entertained audiences in a number of comedies and family-friendly films, including 1991’s “Hook” and both “Sister Act” and “Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit.” She also co-starred with Goldie Hawn, Diane Keaton, and Bette Midler in 1996’s “The First Wives Club.”
The decade also saw Queen Elizabeth II formally declaring Smith a Dame in 1990 for contributions to the arts. The honor, formally known as a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, is the female equivalent of being made a knight.
Three years later, Smith encountered a young actor whom she would eventually work with for several years when she starred in the BBC adaptation of “David Copperfield” alongside Daniel Radcliffe. In 2021, the “Harry Potter” star told Stephen Colbert that he in part had Smith to thank for helping him land the title role in the series.
“I met Maggie Smith when I was nine for the first time. I did a thing before Potter, called David Copperfield, a BBC adaptation–one people, no two people clapping! Don’t all join in now,” he said. “But thank you, but Maggie was the person that like recommended me for Potter, so she’s the reason I ended up doing that.”
I met her when I was nine for the first time. I didn’t know who she was. My parents were like, ‘Oh my god, you’re working with Maggie Smith, that’s huge.’ But I was not like a Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie fan, so I didn’t know who that was!” Radcliffe added.
Smith joined the “Harry Potter” franchise as Professor Minerva McGonagall ahead of the 2001 film “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.” She went on to reprise the role in the seven subsequent films, which culminated in “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part Two.”
Despite the enormous cultural and commercial success of the film franchise, Smith later admitted to the Evening Standard that “it wasn’t what you’d call satisfying. I didn’t really feel I was acting in those things.” The actress added that she’d have preferred to take on more stage roles, but “there wasn’t anything that came along.”
In 2010, Smith joined another ensemble cast when she took on the role of Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham in the British drama “Downton Abbey.” Six years later, the actress admitted that her 2001 film “Gosford Park,” which was written by “Downton” creator Julian Fellowes.
The actress also spoke fondly of the role. She said, “I thought it was great fun because she was so – well, obviously the oldest in the group. And it was wonderful because she would just sort – she was in the position where she could say what she wanted to say because she was the elder and they deferred to her. And that was – it was fun.”
(Despite all that fun, in 2018 Smith admitted she had yet to watch a single episode of the series, despite having been given a box set of DVDs. The reason? “I haven’t got time,” she said.)
In 2023, Smith added model to her long list of accomplishments and roles when luxury fashion house Loewe featured the 88-year-old in its winter campaign. As one person tweeted in response to the photos, “the serve of the day is presented to you by dame maggie smith!! [photos] by juergen teller for loewe.”
Smith was born on Dec. 28, 1934 in Essex, the younger sister of twin brothers, who she credited with paving the way for her career in the performing arts. Smith told NPR, “I have no idea where I got the idea from to do what I do. But I think they – Ian and Alistair, my brothers kind of opened a lot of doors for me onto the world – you know, made it seem to be a very, very interesting place.”
She married Robert Stephens in June 1967 and the pair welcomed two sons before they divorced in 1975. Their relationship began with a scandal, as Stephens was still married to his first wife Tarn Bassett when they met.
She married her second husband, Beverley Cross, in the same year and the pair were married until Cross died in 1998. The two first met in 1952 when Cross was married to Elizabeth Clunies-Ross, and their relationship was professional until both Smith and Cross had divorced their respective partners.
She once told The Guardian that she continued to work throughout her children’s lives because she was compelled to do so and that “they are probably fine… maybe better without me. But you do have a guilty feeling, and yet it was obviously the right thing for me to do – coming back – because I think I am just unbearable if am not acting and because I haven’t done it for so long it’s got on everybody’s nerves, especially mine.”
“Actually I think my children enjoy me more because I work. They’d probably find me rather hateful if I didn’t,” Smith added. “If you give up anything that you should do anyway, it’s probably very wrong. One can only go on one’s instincts in this life.”
The actress suffered two major health scares during her professional career. The first was a diagnosis of Grave’s disease in January 1988. Smith was also diagnosed with breast cancer in 2007.
Smith is survived by her sons and five grandchildren.
