DAME MAGGIE SMITH

(28 December 1934 - 27 September 2024)

With a dame or a name like Maggie Smith, who has died aged 89 from Graves’ disease of the thyroid gland, where do you start to appraise a career which began over seventy years ago? She has conquered all the performing arts on stage, in film and on television. Young people will remember her from the Harry Potter films, while slightly older audiences will have followed her as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey. Film fans would have appreciated her Oscar-winning performance in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Theatregoers will know her from the Oxford Playhouse, the Chichester and Edinburgh festivals, the Old Vic, the National Theatre and the West End. Overseas audiences will have seen her on Broadway, in Australia and at the Shakespeare Festival at Stratford, Ontario. She was equally at home in Shakespeare, Restoration comedy or drama as well the work of more modern playwrights. Maggie Smith certainly lived the actor’s life to the fullest, indeed an actress for all seasons.

She was born Margaret Natalie Smith in Ilford, Essex, to Nathaniel Smith, a public health pathologist from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and his wife Margaret, a Scottish secretary from Glasgow. When Maggie was four, the family with their older twin boys Alistair and Ian moved to Oxford where Maggie began her stage career studying at the Oxford Playhouse. At age 17 she joined the Oxford University Dramatic Society, her first part being Viola in Twelfth Night at the Playhouse and she became a resident cast member. It was not long before she hit Broadway in the revue New Faces of ‘56. Back in the UK, she was cast in Bamber Gascoigne’s comical diversion with music, Share My Lettuce, with Kenneth Williams (whose voice range was possibly an influence on her own vocal abilities).

She worked again with Williams in the Peter Shaffer romantic double-bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye in 1962, winning the first of her six best actress Evening Standard awards. Her early work was mainly in comedy and revue, so she was astonished when Laurence Olivier saw her in Congreve’s The Double Dealer and asked her to join the National Theatre Company at The Old Vic. She stayed for eight years and was amazed when Olivier cast her as Desdemona opposite his Othello. Who was the finer actor is a moot point as their relationship was one of theatrical rivalry. Certainly, Smith held her ground and some might say that Frank Finlay’s Iago was the better male performance. She built up an excellent range of roles including Beatrice in Franco Zeffirelli’s outstanding production of Much Ado About Nothing in 1967. Maggie Smith could do no wrong so that her Hedda Gabler, directed by Ingmar Bergman, won her her second Evening Standard award. She played Private Lives on Broadway in 1970 and was nominated for both a Tony and the Drama Desk award. When her own private life was having problems, she decided to move to Stratford, Ontario, in 1976 to work with Robin Phillips’ company in several Shakespeare productions. Later on she appeared in Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day on Broadway and gained another Tony nomination. She also returned to New York for Peter Shaffer’s comedy Lettice and Lovage, the play she had done in London with Margaret Tyzack, and for which she won a Tony.

Maggie Smith’s film career began in 1956 playing a party guest (uncredited) in Child in the House, Cy Endfield’s drama starring Phyllis Calvert. Three years later she co-starred in Seth Holt’s Nowhere to Go, a crime thriller co-written by Holt and the critic Kenneth Tynan in which her character looks after an escaped criminal played by George Nader. She received a Bafta nomination, the first of 18 such awards. She made a mark in The V.I.P.s with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, while for her next film, the National Theatre production of Othello, she was Oscar-nominated for the first time. In our 1964-65 annual, Film Review named her a ‘Rising Star’. Maggie Smith continued to appear in a variety of movies – Jack Clayton’s The Pumpkin Eater with Anne Bancroft, Jack Cardiff’s Young Cassidy, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Honey Pot, based loosely on Ben Jonson’s Volpone. She was very funny in Hot Millions with Peter Ustinov, and outstanding in Richard Attenborough’s Oh! What a Lovely War, singing the hilarious World War I recruiting song ‘I’ll Make a Man of You’.

Later the same year (1969) she won the first of her two Academy Awards for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, based on Muriel Spark’s novel about a Scottish teacher who tries to influence her girls to believe in the fascist leaders Mussolini and Franco. The film also co-starred her then-husband Robert Stephens. It is perhaps unfortunate that Maggie Smith replaced Katharine Hepburn in George Cukor’s adaptation of Graham Greene’s novel Travels With My Aunt because she was some 27 years younger than Hepburn so had to age-up as Aunt Augusta, but not convincingly so. She seemed to be rehearsing for her role in Downton Abbey some thirty-odd years in the future. That didn’t matter because she was nominated for an Oscar anyway and went on to give really good performances in Alan J. Pakula’s Love and Pain and the Whole Damn Thing, Neil Simon’s spoof detective film Murder by Death, John Guillermin’s Death on the Nile, and with Michael Caine in Neil Simon’s California Suite she nabbed her second Academy Award, even though she was playing an Oscar-losing actress.

Maggie Smith also made an impression on television. She won one of four Bafta TV awards for playing Mrs Silly in All for Love, a series of short stories adapted for TV, and went solo in A Bed Among the Lentils, one of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads monologues in which she gave a very moving performance as a vicar’s wife devoid of loving care while knocking back the Communion wine. It won a Bafta nomination as did her performance in Bennett’s 1984 film A Private Function, playing a housewife having to cope with a wartime pig at home. Bennett’s The Lady in the Van featured a blazing turn from Smith both on stage and on film and it brought her a sixth Olivier nomination. Her career was packed with outstanding performances in films such as Merchant-Ivory’s A Room With a View, Jack Clayton’s The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (another Bafta) and Clayton’s Memento Mori (another Bafta nomination), so that it felt like Maggie Smith could do no wrong, seemingly winning for virtually everything she put her name and talent to.

She began to appear in more obviously commercial film projects such as Hook, Sister Act and its sequel, The First Wives Club and Keeping Mum, but then there were also Ladies in Lavender with her great friend Judi Dench, The Secret Garden, Richard III with Ian McKellen and some real charmers such as Franco Zeffirelli’s Tea with Mussolini, with Dench, Cher and Joan Plowright. The all-star cast of Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (another Oscar nod) saw Smith warming up for the Dowager Countess in Downton Abbey for six seasons and two feature films. It won her three Primetime Emmys. Working with Dench again she was nominated for The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel by the Screen Actors Guild. In the Dustin Hoffman-directed Quartet she received yet another Golden Globe nomination. From 2001 Harry Potter came on the screen scene with Smith playing the Scottish witch Professor Minerva McGonagall in seven of the eight films, a role and a hat for which she will be forever remembered. She worked on stage until 2019, when her final performance was a solo reading at the Bridge Theatre of A German Life, about the woman who was Joseph Goebbels’ secretary. Her last film was The Miracle Club in 2023 about a group of Irish women on a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

Maggie Smith married the actor Robert Stephens in 1967 and they had two sons, the actors Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens. They divorced in 1975 and Maggie married the playwright Beverly Cross later that year and they stayed together until his death in 1998.

Maggie Smith was rarely out of work because that is what she always wanted to do. Standing no nonsense, she carried on acting for as long as she could. She has been quoted as saying "One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting." Alas, no more, but she had a hell of a time doing it and her audiences will continue to remember how very good she was. This great lady of the theatre will never be forgotten.

MICHAEL DARVELL