Dame Maggie Smith, the actress known for her sharp verbal skills, her ability to raise an eyebrow at just the right time and her keen wit, has died. She was 89, according to her publicist and family.
Winner of two Academy Awards, five Bafta Awards, four Primetime Emmy Awards and a long list of other awards, Smith is probably best known for her work as romantic, egotistical school teacher Jane Brodie in Miss Jane Brodie’s Peak” (1969). Helena Bonham Carter, the frustrated cousin and companion who visits Harry Potter’s stern Professor Minerva, in James Ivory and Ismail Merchant’s 1985 A Room with a View. She also played the Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey; the one-liners had peals of laughter on both sides of the Atlantic.
Despite his success, Smith insists he never made any plans for his career, preferring spontaneity. He once said: “Honestly, whatever happens, happens.”
“She could capture more moments in one go than many actors could capture in an entire film,” said Nicholas Hytner, who directed Alan Bennett’s “The Lady in the Van.” “And in terms of comedy, she brought to the set every day the energy and curiosity of a young actor starting out.”
Critic Michael Coveney, who wrote a biography of Smith in 1992, stressed that knowledge of Smith’s childhood was fundamental to understanding her work, as he wrote of her as “a repressed, repressed soul known for his loud, slightly malicious raspy voice.” Smith was born in Ilford, England, and grew up in Oxford, where she feuded with her fundamentalist Presbyterian parents and twin brother. Her mother did not think she had much chance of becoming an actor with “that face” and thought her daughter should take secretarial courses before she won an Oscar for Miss Jean Brodie. Her father, Nate, a lab technician, was more supportive of Smith and diligently recorded Smith’s clippings.
As a child, Smith was fascinated by a series of books called The Whispering Curtains. From an early age, the attraction to acting was that it was a way to escape to another world. “A better world,” he once told critic Nancy Banks Smith. “I was never shy on the stage. Always shy of it…The real world is just an illusion.”
After Smith graduated from the Oxford High School for Girls, although she did not like school, she entered the Oxford Theatre School of Drama, where she excelled. At age 17, she caught the eye of playwright Beverley Cross while playing Viola in Twelfth Night, and they married 23 years later. “While everyone was imitating Olivier, she didn’t speak in the dramatic Oxford tone, which was totally unique,” he recalls. “I thought, this is a very special person; she’s worth watching. She looks very beautiful with her red hair, very thin, very tall.” She was also “very vulnerable and very, very funny”.
Smith’s comic talent, her alliterative talent for combining dialogue with biting humor (perhaps a witty way of rebelling against her Puritan upbringing), began to attract attention. After honing her rhythm and improvisation skills in revues, she was soon sent to New York by Broadway producer Leonard Hillman, where she starred in the 1956 revue “New Faces.” Two subsequent Broadway productions, Noel Coward’s Private Lives (1975) and Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day (1979), earned her Tony Award nominations for Best Actress.
By the 1960s, she had moved to London’s West End and, despite her uneasy relationship with Laurence Olivier, began working at the Old Vic under his artistic direction. “Looking back – it’s the only thing everybody does now – it was so exciting,” she recalls. “Doing ‘Othello’ one night and ‘Hay Fever’ the next was like being on holiday.”
Since she flits back and forth between Chekhov, Strindberg and Shakespeare (Shakespeare “is not to my liking,” she admits), she has a keen interest in change and a nervous personality. “Maggie was no good,” said playwright Peter Shaffer, who first met Smith in 1962. “She stood and walked around from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Everybody else was eating sandwiches, and there was just one person in the background who looked like a caged creature walking around. There’s no such thing as a coffee break.”
In 1967, Smith married the charismatic actor Robert Stephens, often regarded as the next Olivier. The couple have two sons, both of whom are now actors. It was a turbulent marriage, marred by Stephens’ alcoholism and promiscuity, and soon after the couple divorced, Smith married the aforementioned Cross, who had proposed twenty years earlier.
Smith is famously private and rarely gives interviews, but in an interview with The Daily Telegraph in 2014 he described the overwhelming grief he felt in the years following Cross’s death in 1998. “They said it would go away, but it didn’t,” he said. “It shatters. It sucks, but what can you do? You get lonely even when you’re busy. In a completely busy day, your mind wanders as to why you’re alone, but when it stops, it’s deafening silence.
Despite Smith’s insistence on secrecy (when Coveney asked him for a biography of him, he said: “It’s awful. It’s awful. I can’t think of anything worse”), he is still considered a British national treasure. However, he quickly dismissed the label as arbitrary. “Everything is iconic,” he said after winning the Evening Standard Drama Icon Award. “If you exist long enough, you’re an icon. A dusty icon… or a national treasure.”
Smith, who rose to fame later in her career with “Harry Potter” and “Downton Abbey,” has always expressed skepticism about the change of fortune. She did not like the fame she received, describing being surrounded by “thugs” during a trip to Paris. “I don’t go anywhere and when I do I almost always need a friend,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “It’s difficult when you’re alone because you have nowhere to escape to … What do these big movie stars do? What do they do? Maybe they never worry about their fame.” Smith was occasionally stopped from pleasing her peers, such as her 2023 fashion campaign for Loewe, which went viral.
Smith doesn’t spend much time thinking about legacy. “It won’t last forever,” she said in the same interview with The Telegraph, recalling her friends Lauren Bacall and Robin Williams. “There are new things coming out in the world all the time. I don’t think people remember that despite working with some of the most famous celebrities of the 20th century, she never kept a notebook or diary.” She seems nonchalant about aging and optimistic about approaching ninety. In 1991, when Smith was filming “Hook,” Steven Spielberg asked a colleague in his costume department how old she was. “My friend said without hesitation, ’92!’ And I’ve been like that ever since, worried they won’t need me anymore.”
