Off The Record
Maggie Smith, The Legendary Oscar-Winning Actress Has Died At The Age Of 89
Maggie Smith, the prolific and multi-award winning performer who starred in shows including Downton Abbey, Harry Potter, and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, passed away at the age of 89.
Her sons, Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens, released a statement in which they confirmed the news. They said: “She passed away peacefully in the hospital early this morning, Friday, 27 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.”
“We would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful staff at the Chelsea and Westminster hospital for their care and unstinting kindness during her final days.”
“We thank you for all your kind messages and support and ask that you respect our privacy at this time.”
One could argue that Smith’s greatest accomplishments stemmed from her ability to deliver sharp-tongued comedies: her Oscar-winning role as the sardonic teacher Jean Brodie, prim period dramas like A Room With a View and Gosford Park, and a string of stage and film roles with Alan Bennett, including The Lady in the Van.
“My career is chequered,” she told the Guardian in 2004. “I think I got pigeonholed in humour… If you do comedy, you kind of don’t count. Comedy is never considered the real thing.”
However, Smith also excelled in non-comedic dramatic roles, performing opposite Laurence Olivier for the National Theatre, winning best actress Bafta for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, and playing the title role in Ingmar Bergman’s 1970 production of Hedda Gabler.
Smith was born in 1934, raised in Oxford, and as a teenager, he started performing at the Playhouse theater in the city.
In addition to participating in a number of theatrical productions, such as Bamber Gascoigne’s 1957 musical comedy Share My Lettuce starring Kenneth Williams, Smith also made significant strides in the film industry.
Her first notable role came in the 1958 Seth Holt thriller Nowhere to Go, for which she received a Bafta nomination for best supporting actress. After appearing in Peter Shaffer’s stage double bill The Private Ear and The Public Eye, Smith received an invitation from Olivier to join the newly established National Theatre company in 1962.
Smith performed in a number of productions for Olivier, including his infamous blackface production of Othello in 1964, where she played Desdemona. (The following year, Smith reprised the part in Olivier’s film adaptation, for which they received Oscar nominations.)
Smith won the best actress Oscar in 1970 after landing the lead part in the 1969 adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was about an Edinburgh schoolteacher who harbored affection for Mussolini.
Later the same year she starred in Ingmar Bergman’s production of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler for the National Theatre in London’s West End; the Evening Standard’s Milton Shulman described her as “haunting] the stage like some giant portrait by Modigliani, her alabaster skin stretched tight with hidden anguish.”
In 1973, she received another Oscar nomination for best actress for the Graham Greene adaptation Travels with My Aunt.
In 1979, she won the Oscar for best supporting actress for the Neil Simon-scripted anthology piece California Suite, in which she portrayed an Oscar-nominated movie star.
Throughout the 1980s, Smith successfully pursued her simultaneous careers in theater and movies. She co-wrote the script for the wartime comedy A Private Function, which starred Michael Palin and was nominated for another Oscar.
She also had a colorful supporting role in Merchant Ivory’s A Room With a View, playing the gossipy cousin Charlotte Bartlett. She then went on to do a character study titled The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, in which Smith portrayed the title character, an unmarried and disillusioned lady.
She performed as Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s 1980 production at the Canadian Stratford Festival. In 1987, she portrayed Lettice Douffet, the tour guide, in Peter Shaffer’s Lettice and Lovage.
She also worked with Bennett again for his radio and television Talking Heads series, in which she played the role of an affair-seeking vicar’s wife.
Her film career took off when she was cast as a dowager countess in Robert Altman’s country-house murder mystery Gosford Park, opposite Judi Dencht in Charles Dance’s Ladies in Lavender, and alongside Joan Plowright and Cher in Franco Zeffirelli’s loosely autobiographical Tea With Mussolini.
She also agreed to play the significant part of Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter film series, starring in all but the first installment of the series from 2001 to 2011. In the meantime, she landed what is likely her most memorable TV part as the countess of Grantham in Julian Fellowes’ Gosford Park.
Fellowes will reprise the character in two stand-alone motion pictures, which will be released in 2019 and 2022.
Smith experienced a late career victory in Alan Bennett’s book, The Lady in the Van, about the woman who lived on his driveway, after playing the part on stage in 1999.
Between 1967 and 1975, Smith was married to fellow actor Robert Stephens, and from 1975 and his death in 1998, he was married to Beverley Cross.
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