Maggie Smith, Beloved Actress Whose Career Spans Generations, Dead at 89

The two-time Oscar winner was one of the most acclaimed British actors of all time, someone who could stretch from E.M. Forster to franchise movies.

Maggie Smith, an acting giant who became beloved to younger generations through her work on the “Harry Potter” films and “Downton Abbey” TV Series, is dead at 89, IndieWire has confirmed.

Smith won two Academy Awards: Best Actress for 1969’s “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” and Best Supporting Actress for 1978’s “California Suite.” She also won five BAFTAs, four Emmys, three Golden Globes, and a Tony Award.

She was perhaps best known the world over in her last days, however, for her work as Professor McGonagall in eight “Harry Potter” films, as well as her role as the Dowager Countess Grantham on “Downton Abbey.” But those titles, though bringing her to a new generation and showing how she could impart her own indelible spin on even franchise material, were just the tiniest part of a career of legendary depth and breadth.

Smith was born December 28, 1934 in Essex. Her father was a pathologist who worked at Oxford, her mother a secretary from Glasgow. Needless to say, acting was not something she was born into. But the bug hit her early and she left high school at 16 to study acting at the Oxford Playhouse. Her career began there at the age of 17 as Viola in “Twelfth Night.” In 1956, she made her Broadway debut in “New Faces of ’56” at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre (the same year she made her first uncredited film appearance in a British film called “Child in the House” — her first actual screen credit, in 1959’s “Nowhere to Go” also resulted in her first of 18 BAFTA nominations). In 1962, she joined Laurence Olivier at his new National Theatre Company at London’s Old Vic, where she quickly made a name for herself alongside her peers Michael Gambon and Derek Jacobi. Her first Oscar nomination, for best supporting actress, came playing Desdemona opposite Olivier’s controversial Othello in Stuart Burge’s 1965 adaptation of the Shakespeare play.

“The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie,” for which she won her first Oscar, showed her command of the craft. The way she could make a meal out of any dialogue, could transfix viewers with her stare, and display layers between external affect and internal emotional reality. For that quintessentially British part as a schoolteacher in Scotland, Dave Kehr in the Chicago Reader singled out her gift, saying that she gave “One of those technically stunning, emotionally distant performances that the British are so damn good at.”

In fact, Smith became synonymous with everything revered about British acting as the decades went on, the way that Olivier had been before her. But in her case, alongside her contemporary and frequent scene-partner Judi Dench, Smith also came to symbolize the greatness of older British actresses — and how, across the pond, they have a film and TV industry that has many great roles for older women, the way that the U.S. still sadly does not. Playing a wealthy old aristocrat become a specialty for Smith: Think of her chastising those approving of Ivor Novello’s singing and piano playing in “Gosford Park” — “Don’t encourage him!” she keeps telling everyone else, in only the way she could. Or the imperiousness she brought to her part on “Downton Abbey,” when, so insulated from working-class human life, she creaked in puzzlement, “What is…a… week-end?”

It’s hard to know precisely when Smith pivoted to those roles — even her younger characters have an “old soul” grandeur (or sometimes repression) about them. Her range was as great as any actress we’ve seen: In 1978 she was Lady Macbeth at the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and also in a thankless role as a traveling nurse companion in the film adaptation of “Death on the Nile.” She’s simply unforgettable as a traveling companion to young Helena Bonham Carter in “A Room with a View,” where she has some of her best early work bouncing off Dench. When Dench’s character, a vivacious lady novelist, urges her to breathe deeply the Tuscan air, Smith gives a feeble attempt and immediately applies a handkerchief to her face in disgust. Or her intake of breath in shock when Dench’s character tells her that Florence is ripe for “physical sensation.” She could convey disgust that’s almost singular in the history of cinema.

Young audiences in her later years came to know her for Professor Minerva McGonagall in seven of the eight “Harry Potter” films from 2001 to 2011. Oddly enough, she had worked with a young Daniel Radcliffe in 1999’s TV adaptation of “David Copperfield,” where he played the young title character, prior to his role in the “Potter” films.

“[Rickman and I] used to laugh together because we ran out of reaction shots,” she told NPR about shooting the beloved blockbuster series. “They were always — when everything had been done and the children were finished, they would turn the camera around and we’d have to do various reaction shots of amazement or sadness and things. And we used to say we’d got to about number 200-and-something and we’d run out of knowing what to do when the camera came around on us.”

She would become a pop culture icon once again in her work as the Dowager Countess Violet Crawley on the ITV/PBS series “Downton Abbey,” which ran for six seasons from 2010 to 2015 and has so far also released two feature films in which she also appeared. She delighted in the no-fucks-left-to-give part, and audiences adored her for it. 

“I thought it was great fun,” she said. “…. 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.”

You could tell. That’s the thing about Smith’s roles — you could still tell the enjoyment she derived from them even as much as she disappeared into them. And anyone who watched her had fun, too.