Acting Icon Dame Maggie Smith Has Died at 89

The formidable dowager Violet Crawley, Maggie Smith’s scene-stealing character in Downton Abbey, made Smith a bona fide celebrity.

“It’s ridiculous. I led a perfectly normal life until Downton Abbey,” said Smith, who has died at 89. “I’m not kidding. I’d go to theaters. I’d go to galleries. Things like that, on my own, and now I can’t. And that’s—you know—awful. It’s all… It’s truly television. I mean, I’ve been working around for a very long time before Downton Abbey. And life was fine. Nobody knew who the hell I was. Now, it’s all—it has changed.”

Downton Abbey climaxed her unlikely climb to household name that had begun with her appearances in the Harry Potter movies (she was author J. K. Rowling’s choice for the role of Minerva McGonagall). And though fame came late to the two-time Academy Award-winner, it hit like a hammer when it did arrive, exposing her to the bald glare of celebrity and all the nuisances that entails, including one woman who approached her and insisted she parrot one of Violet’s most memorably clueless lines, “What is a weekend?”

Then there was the young Harry Potter fan who “said to me, ‘Were you... were you really a cat?’ And I heard myself say, ‘Just pull yourself together.’"

Mostly she seemed more wryly amused than truly annoyed by the nuisance of fame: “It’s true I don’t tolerate fools, but then they don’t tolerate me, so I am spiky. Maybe that’s why I’m quite good at playing spiky elderly ladies.”

In fact, she was “quite good” at almost every role she undertook and over the course of a long, distinguished career, she racked up two Oscars, a Tony, four Emmys, and three Golden Globes to prove it.

Dame Margaret Natalie Smith CH DBE was born Dec. 28, 1934 in Ilford, Essex. Her own version of her life thereafter was terse but to the point: “One went to school, one wanted to act, one started to act, and one’s still acting,” she said. “I love it. I’m privileged to do it, and I don’t know where I’d be without it.”

She was first nominated for an Oscar for her portrayal of Desdemona in the 1965 film version of Othello (in an Academy first, all four principal actors in the movie were Oscar nominees). She had originated the role in the National Theatre Company’s production in London in 1964.

Four years later she won the best actress Oscar for the title role in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and ten years later won a best supporting actress Oscar for California Suite, for which she also won a Golden Globe.

Both stage and screen versions of Othello were directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, the National’s founder, who also played the title role. His decision to play Othello in blackface and a kinky black wig was reviled and prompted The New York Times to headline its review of the film as a “Minstrel Show Othello.” At least Smith saw some praise: “Maggie Smith’s red-haired Desdemona is a beautifully vibrant, sensitive lass who accepts the realization of her doom with pathetic submissiveness.”

Smith herself was not too happy with her performance: “I did Desdemona with great discomfort and was terrified all the time. But then everyone was terrified of Larry [Olivier, who had hired her for the National’s company, where she flourished for two decades].”

“Larry used to say there was a merry war between us,” she said of her friendship with Olivier. “We just knew each other so well. I mean, he was incredibly kind to me. Very patient with me. And, then, he kind of... he would just get mad at certain things.” When pressed, she said, “He turned on me once, but that’s OK. It was right, because… he wanted me to do various things at the National—parts that I thought were ludicrous... I remember the thing that really—I knew I couldn’t do—was Skin of Our Teeth, which was the thing that Vivien Leigh had been so enormously successful in, and I thought, ‘This is ridiculous.’ And I think I probably said as much.” Olivier’s reaction was physical. “He just, just slapped me rather hard in Othello.” The line was, “Out Devil!” and he slapped her hard enough to knock her out.

“I wanted to be a serious actress, but of course that didn’t really happen,” she said late in life. “Then I think I got pigeonholed in humor. Shakespeare is not my thing.” Here modesty got in the way of truth, for while she excelled at comedy, she also excelled at, well, pretty much everything. She drew raves, for example, for her stage performances in plays ranging from Chekhov to Ibsen to Albee.

Her versatility allowed her to avoid being typecast in films until the end of her career, at which point she said, “I think I’m just, well, with old, old mad women, if you know what I mean. They seem to be, well, the one thing I can do now.” Translation: the one thing Hollywood would allow her to do.

She was philosophical about it: “When you get into the granny era, you’re lucky to get anything.” Certainly the situation was not without its irony, since it was when she began playing acerbic dowagers and ancient wizards that she became a celebrity. And the situation was not without its unintentional humor: In the acclaimed 1995 film version of Shakespeare’s Richard III, she played the mother of characters played by Nigel Hawthorne, John Wood and Ian McKellen, although she was more than five years younger than Hawthorne, four years younger than Wood, and only four years older than McKellen.

First and last, she was a creature of the theater, still acting on stage into her eighties. There she felt most at home, and free of celebrity’s impingement: when she was a guest on The Graham Norton Show in 2015, it was the first time she had appeared on a TV talk show since 1973.

Movies, on the other hand, remained alien territory. Despite having won two Oscars, she insisted that “I still don’t begin to understand film acting,” and she didn’t enjoy watching herself on screen. “I think it’s because you can’t do anything about it. In the theater, at least, you think, ‘Oh, I’ll have another go tomorrow night,’ but [film is] forever… And of course, you’re forced to see them if you’re at one of these premier things. But you always think, ‘Why on earth did I do it like that?’”

Other than the occasional clip, she never watched Downton Abbey. “It got to a point when it was too late to catch up,” she said.