Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89

She earned an extraordinary array of awards, from Oscars to Emmys to a Tony, but she could still go almost everywhere unrecognized. Then came “Downton Abbey.”

Maggie Smith, one of the greatest British stage and screen actors of her generation, from a free-thinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died Friday in London. She was 89.

Her family announced her death in a hospital with a statement issued by a publicist but did not indicate the cause of death.

American moviegoers barely knew Ms. Smith (now Dame Maggie to her countrymen) when she starred in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), about a teacher at a girls’ school in the 1930s who dared to have progressive social views — and a love life. According to Vincent Canby, she was “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” For this role, she earned the Academy Award for best actress.

She won a second Oscar, for best supporting actress, for “California Suite” (1978), based on Neil Simon’s stage comedy. Her character, a British actress attending the Oscars with her bisexual husband (Michael Caine), has a disappointing evening at the ceremony and a bittersweet night in bed.

In real life, prizes started coming Ms. Smith’s way in the 1950s, when at 20 she won her first Evening Standard Theater Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs, and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.

Until “Downton Abbey.”.

This series follows the Earl of Grantham, Hugh Bonneville, his almost-entirely aristocratic family and his rather more troublesome household staff at their big Jacobean mansion, as the world around them-from 1912 to 1925-refuses to keep still.

 #A Breakout Star

The show ran for six seasons after it had debuted in Britain in 2010 and in the United States a year later. Of course, the breakout star from the beginning has been Ms. Smith as Lord Grantham’s elderly and still stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess. She disapproved of electric lights, was unfamiliar with the word “weekend,” and never met a person or a situation she couldn’t ridicule with imperious withering wit. But when her son’s wife suggested shipping over a younger cousin to spend some time in New York, Lady Violet protested: “Oh, I don’t think things are quite that desperate.”

It wasn’t until she was in her mid-70s that Ms. Smith became an overnight sensation.

“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,'” she said at the B.F.I. and Radio Times Television Festival in 2017. Later in that interview, she added: “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”

The closest Ms. Smith had come to that kind of visibility was through Harry Potter movies. In seven out of the eight movies, from “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” in 2001 to “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2” in 2011, she was Minerva McGonagall, transfiguration teacher of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, stern but fearless.

McGonagall, in her high-necked, Victorian-style gowns, adorned with a trademark Scottish brooch and her hair swept back under her tall, black witch’s hat, gave an impressive impression on-screen. Yet Ms Smith says that she did not herself have her movements constantly pursued, public venues excepted, unless by children.

Many very tiny people would wave at me, which was nice,” she recalled on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2015. A boy gently approached her and asked, “Were you really a cat?”

Margaret Natalie Smith was born Dec. 28, 1934, in Ilford, England, that town in East London. Her father was a public-health pathologist, Nathaniel Smith, and her mother a secretary, Margaret (Hutton) Smith, of Scotland birth.

It was 1939 when Maggie and her family moved to Oxford. Her father had accepted a teaching job there. She attended the Oxford School for Girls, where, after completing her studies, she joined the newly established Oxford Playhouse. There she made her professional debut in 1952 in “Twelfth Night.”

‘You Have to Be’

The urge to act had always been there. “It’s not even that you particularly want to be an actor,” she once said. “You have to be. There’s nothing you can do to stop it.”

Although she made her screen debut in her first film when she was little more than 20 years old, appearing as a party guest in “Child in the House,” a 1956 drama, and making her London stage debut in “Share My Lettuce,” a 1957 musical revue, it is probably fair to say that, for most of her life, Ms. Smith was never an ingénue.

Her first two films included “The V.I.P.s” (1963), a Technicolor melodrama with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and “The Pumpkin Eater” (1964), a marital drama about a marital breakup, written by Harold Pinter from a novel by Penelope Mortimer. In the first, she was the mousy, adoring secretary of a handsome tycoon (Rod Taylor). In the second, she was Anne Bancroft’s weird houseguest who wouldn’t shut up — or leave.”. Both were made before she was 30, but both characters are, in their own ways, already world-weary.

In “The Honey Pot” (1967), a glamorous murder-mystery comedy starring Rex Harrison, she was Susan Hayward’s nurse-companion.

Ms. Smith was 37 when she appeared in “Travels With My Aunt” (1972), a film version of Graham Greene’s novel, playing Aunt Augusta, an amoral globe-trotter in her 70s. (Katharine Hepburn, 68 at the time, had been cast but dropped out because of a disagreement with producers.)

New York was never a significant factor in Ms. Smith’s career. After “New Faces of 1956,” a revue in which she made her Broadway debut, she avoided the stage for nearly two decades. Back in 1975 with the sophisticated Amanda Prynne in Noël Coward’s “Private Lives,” about a divorced couple reunited by honeymoon with their new spouses, she appeared thereafter as an unhappy wife to the mining magnate in Tom Stoppard’s “Night and Day” (1979). She received Tony nominations for both roles.

In “Lettice and Lovage” (1990), Ms. Smith played a tour guide who makes up outrageous (and vastly entertaining) lies about the old houses she shows people through. Frank Rich paid tribute in his review for The Times: “Miss Smith’s personality so saturates everything around her that, like the character she plays, she instantly floods a world of gray with color,” he wrote. “This is idiosyncratic theater acting of a high and endangered order.”

That performance earned her a Tony for best actress in a play. But Broadway was a wink of the eye compared with the British stage.

In the early 1960s, Ms. Smith starred opposite Laurence Olivier at the National Theater in “Othello,” as Desdemona, the devoted but doomed wife. (The 1965 movie version brought her the first of her six Oscar nominations.)

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 #A British Stage Record

She took home six Evening Standard awards in stage performances-a record-for such as “The Private Ear” and “The Public Eye”, a comedy double bill by Peter Shaffer in 1962.

That was followed by the title role in “Hedda Gabler” (1970), the director Ingmar Bergman’s first production outside Scandinavia. In the 1980s, Ms. Smith won for Edna O’Brien’s “Virginia” (1981), in which she played the novelist Virginia Woolf, and for her role as the willful Millamant in “The Way of the World” (1984), William Congreve’s Restoration comedy about marriage and money.

It was in 1994 that Ms Smith won for playing the oldest of the title characters in Edward Albee’s “Three Tall Women.” According to Paul Taylor in The Independent, she was the person who hardened into a monster because she has had the burden of being strong for everybody in the family.

It was 25 years since Ms. Smith last won an award. She took best actress honours at the National Theatre Awards for “A German Life” (2019), playing the long-term secretary of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister.

“What Smith captures brilliantly,” wrote Michael Billington, the critic for The Guardian, “is the way, in old age, vagueness of memory coexists with moments of piercing clarity.”

She spent three seasons at the Stratford Festival in Canada, filling a rich assortment of roles: Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth and — in “Richard III” — the 15th-century queen of England.

# But it was cinema that made her an international star.

She had some amusing and smallish roles in mainstream American films-a good sprinkling of the smaller parts-but few of them called for much subtle nuance, such as small tests or manipulations of passions. We see her in almost successful films like “Sister Act” (1992), where she plays a mother superior trying to civilize a nightclub singer hiding out at the convent (Whoopi Goldberg), or “The First Wives Club” (1996), when she plays a Manhattan soignée divorcée sympathizing with the woes of younger women.

She spent the rest of her time in corsets and wigs and in buttoned boots for the rest of her acting time. “I’m always in corsets and I’m always in wigs and I’m always in those buttoned boots” she told film critic Barry Norman in a television interview in 1993. “I don’t remember when I last appeared in modern dress”.

She was an apprehensive, overprotective chaperone accompanying a young woman to Florence in Italy in Merchant Ivory’s “A Room With a View” (1985); an unforgiving housekeeper at a Yorkshire mansion in “The Secret Garden” (1993); a melodramatic New York auntie in “Washington Square” (1997); and a fashion-conscious Londoner who has a crush on the new priest (Michael Palin) in “The Missionary” (1982).

In Quartet (1981), Ms. Smith was an artsy British expatriate in 1920s Paris. (She would reappear in an unrelated film of the same name in 2012, playing a retired opera diva.)

The 1930s must have felt like home. Two of her Agatha Christie pictures, featuring the master detective Hercule Poirot, were set in that decade. In Death on the Nile (1978), she was the nurse-companion of a kleptomaniac (Bette Davis). In Evil Under the Sun (1982), she was a saucy Adriatic-island hotelier.

“Murder by Death” (1976), Neil Simon’s spoof of Hollywood detectives, was set in a mythical 1930s (the clothes and the cars) that somehow included astute references to television, World War II and Humphrey Bogart movies that hadn’t been made yet. Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Ms. Smith), like Nick and Nora Charles of “The Thin Man,” adored a wire-haired fox terrier and multiple daily martinis.

Then there was Robert Altman’s “Gosford Park” (2001), set at a weekend in a 1930s English-country house, from a screenplay by Julian Fellowes before he started “Downton Abbey”. Ms Smith was a marcel-waved countess with a similar gift for lethal put-downs to Violet Crawley. As pleasingly, the countess responds when a visiting Hollywood producer demurs to reveal how his next movie ends, lest he ruin the plot for his dinner companions: “Oh, but none of us will see it.”.

In “Tea With Mussolini” (1999), Ms. Smith was one of an expatriate quintet enjoying lovely lunches in Florence while Italy fell to Fascism. “A Private Function” (1984), a comedy with Mr. Palin, is a period piece of the period just after the war. “The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne” (1987), a drama about a shy spinster, is a 1950s period film.

I can only remember that in some of her films, Miss. Smith donned stylish clothing most especially in “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” 2011 and its sequel about British seniors in India; also “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood” a film set upon American Southerners who have been good friends ever since they were little kids.

On the other hand, there’s the cinematic taking and making of young Jane Austen in the film “Becoming Jane” from 2007. This romanticizes Jane’s life and love for Tom Lefroy. In one of the more classic BBC productions of “David Copperfield” from 1999, Ms. Smith played the title character’s scowling, blundering but ultimately devoted Georgian-Regency great-aunt, Betsey Trotwood. (Daniel Radcliffe was only 10 when he played the part.)

Although television was minuscule on her résumé, she won four Emmys. Among the first was for HBO’s “My House in Umbria” (2003), playing a romance novelist, and the other three were all for “Downton Abbey”.

Her last films were “The Lady in the Van” (2015), with her playing a defiant homeless woman; “A Boy Called Christmas” (2021); “Downton Abbey: A New Era” (2022), the sequel of two “Downton Abbey” films, wherein the Granthams face Hollywood and the French Riviera; and “The Miracle Club” (2023), comedy against Laura Linney and Kathy Bates.

In 1967, she married English actor Robert Stephens, with whom she had been working on “Jean Brodie.” She divorced him in 1974. She married the playwright and screenwriter, Beverley Cross, in 1975. He died in 1998.

Surviving are two sons from her first marriage, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, both actors; and five grandchildren, the family said.

By the end of 1988, Ms Smith had contracted Graves’ disease-an autoimmune disorder that attacks the thyroid-gland, which she successfully treated with radiotherapy and surgery. Two decades passed, during which she defeated breast cancer.

She was promoted to the rank of Commander of the British Empire; in 1990, a dame; and in 2014, a member of the Order of the Companions of Honor.

Ms. Smith also did not care to sit through movies of her own shows. In 2020, she confessed she hadn’t even seen an installment of “Downton Abbey” yet — “It got to the point where it was too late to catch up” — much less the feature films the series spawned.

Behind the wisecracking exterior, however, beat the heart of a true introvert. In an interview with “60 Minutes” on CBS News in 2013, when someone intimated that she didn’t care about fame, Ms. Smith said: “Absolutely none. I mean, why would I?”

She had long described herself as painfully shy. Much earlier, in a 1979 interview with The Times, she confessed, “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.”

In the 2018 documentary “Tea With the Dames,” an interviewer asked Ms. Smith if the first days on a movie set were still scary for her.

All days are scary,” she said.

A correction on Sept. 27, 2024: An earlier version of this obituary misspelled the number of Tony Awards Ms. Smith won. She won one, not two. It also misspelled the first name of the character she played in the film “Murder by Death.” She was Dora Charles, not Nora. And an earlier version of a picture caption with this obituary misstated the year of the movie “A Room With a View.” As the obituary correctly noted, it was 1985, not 1968.