Dame Maggie Smith, actress who conquered stage and screen with her wit, poise and eccentricity

She spun comic gold out of her formidable bearing in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films

Dame Maggie Smith, the actress, who has died aged 89, was a stylist and a wit whose cool, lacquered voice, suffer-no-fools personality and sophisticated manners gave all her work, whether on stage or screen, the highest distinction.
In her time she won two Oscars, five Baftas (including four for Best Actress, a record), four Emmys, three Golden Globes and numerous other awards, including an honorary Olivier in 2010. But she was admired as much by the public as by her profession. 
She came to be regarded as a rare embodiment of English poise and eccentricity – as well as human complexity. She could wear a look of imperiousness like a mask, but her wide blue eyes could signal haunted vulnerability as effortlessly as they could a reproving disdain.
Tall and elegant, she had a formidable technique, and in later years a formidable bearing, which she capitalised on often without forfeiting her status as a national treasure. From the earliest days, her baleful gaze was on the look-out for satirical opportunity, while her vocal approach was so angled and self-conscious that she was sometimes charged with imitating the cadences of her former associate in revue, Kenneth Williams.
In her defence, the television presenter Bamber Gascoigne once said of a stage performance of hers: “[It] is extraordinarily mannered – but this is largely its strength, since the mannerisms are so completely and unmistakably her own. Most great comedians have this quality of unique oddity; anyone else borrowing the gestures or tricks would look plain ridiculous, but in them the effect is superb.”
Although she ventured into tragedy with a surprising authority – in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for example, and Macbeth – it was in comedy (in films such as The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, or plays such as Private Lives, The Way of the World and Lettice and Lovage) that her art attained unequalled glories.
As gifted on screen as she was on stage, she won an Oscar for her performance as the prim, proper and discreetly pained Edinburgh schoolmistress in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1968), a role originated on stage by Vanessa Redgrave.
Her film career came full-circle as the fearsome but likeable Professor Minerva McGonagall, a stalwart at Hogwarts, in the Harry Potter film series (2001-11), taking charge of the school in the climactic battles against the dastardly Voldemort.
In later years, she further cemented herself in popular affection as imperiousness personified playing Violet Crawley, Dowager Countess of Grantham, in ITV’s stately-home drama Downton Abbey, though she revealed that she never watched the series and was relieved when it finished.
Although her performances in the theatre were inevitably passing wonders – fading from shared cultural memory as generations have gone by – she may perhaps be best remembered for playing the part of Miss Mary Shepherd, the elderly, cantankerous down-and-out who ended up living in a battered van on the Camden driveway of playwright Alan Bennett for 15 years.
Bennett’s memoir-play – The Lady in the Van – opened to a blaze of glowing reviews at the Queen’s Theatre in late 1999. “Her comic timing is irresistible, her vocal delivery lethal in its precision,” the Telegraph raved. “Better still, there are sudden moments when Smith seems to peer deep within, capturing a terrifying sense of anguish and fear.”
A performance that again proved she could inhabit lower-class characters with the same ease as she did the aristocracy, it was immortalised in a popular 2015 film version, directed by Nicholas Hytner.
The youngest of three children, Margaret Natalie Smith was born in Ilford, Essex, on December 28 1934; she had identical twin brothers, six years her senior. When she was four the family moved to the outskirts of Oxford, where her Newcastle-born father, Nathaniel, was employed as a lab technician at the Dunn School of Pathology.
Her biographer Michael Coveney characterised her early years as “Spartan, though certainly not deprived”. According to her brother Ian, however, it was “a very rigid, inflexible upbringing and a humourless childhood. That Maggie managed to break out of it as she did is all the more remarkable.”
She was educated at Oxford High School for Girls, but left aged 16 to train for the stage at the Oxford Playhouse Theatre School. After jobs with the repertory company at Oxford Playhouse, she made her stage debut aged 18 as Viola in Twelfth Night for the Oxford University Dramatic Society and her professional debut, in New York, in the revue New Faces of ’56.
Following other revues at the Edinburgh Festival and the Watergate Theatre, London, she found herself as the leading comedienne opposite Kenneth Williams in Bamber Gascoigne’s revue Share My Lettuce (Lyric, Hammersmith, and Comedy, 1957).
After a small (but typically telling) part in Warren Chetham-Strode’s The Stepmother (St Martin’s), she joined the Old Vic Company. As Lady Plyant in Congreve’s The Double Dealer, Celia in As You Like It (to Barbara Jefford’s Rosalind), the Queen to John Justin’s Richard II, Mistress Ford in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Maggie in What Every Woman Knows, she proved more than just another revue actress trying to go straight.
In 1960 she replaced Joan Plowright in Ionesco’s Rhinoceros when it transferred to the West End from the Royal Court. Later that year she was cast as the talkative blonde mistress of a Home Office baronet in Beverley Cross’s second play, a nuclear-warning farce, Strip the Willow, which folded at Golders Green on its pre-West End run. She was to marry the author some 15 years later.
Her first major West End success – and it glittered – came as Lucile in Jean Anouilh’s The Rehearsal (Globe, Queen’s and Apollo, 1961), a Bristol Old Vic production in which she played a young girl employed to care for orphans in a château who is callously seduced by the debauched hero.
The Daily Mail hailed the seduction scene as “one of the most affecting things to be seen in London at the moment”, while Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times found her “touching, sincere and sometimes devastating”.
Soon afterwards came Peter Shaffer’s equally popular double-bill, The Private Ear and The Public Eye (Globe). In the first, she played Doreen, an office typist on a first date; in the second, the young wife of a jealous accountant who sets a peculiar private detective on to her – the latter part bringing her face to face again with her old revue sparring partner, Kenneth Williams.
According to the director Peter Wood: “They were like greyhounds, the speed at which they could bat and ball it.” For the double-bill the Evening Standard judged her Best Actress of 1962, the first of five ES awards.
The next season brought another prize, from the Variety Club, as best actress for her performance in Jean Kerr’s Mary, Mary (Queen’s, 1963), after which she joined Laurence Olivier’s first National Theatre season at the Old Vic.
As Silvia to Robert Stephens’s Captain Plume in The Recruiting Officer in 1963 she gave the first of many performances with that actor (whom she married in 1967), though as a Restoration actress in her own right her talent was exceptional. In his autobiography, Knight Errant, Stephens recalled their early encounters: “She impressed me then as being a miserable, rather forlorn creature. But she struck across my bows in those opening months of the National like a salt-sprayed sea breeze.” A stagehand is said to have warned him: “Watch out for her, she drinks like a fish and swears like a trooper.”
Maggie Smith’s Desdemona to Olivier’s Othello was surprisingly moving for an actress of such natural, comic instinct; the celluloid incarnation earned her an Oscar nomination. Her stave-carrying, head-scarved Hilde Wangel in The Master Builder, and her vampish Myra (to Stephens’s Sandy Tyrell) in Noël Coward’s production of Hay Fever at the Old Vic in 1964, reminded everyone of her range beyond the favoured smart snarl or drawling put-down.
In her third season with the new National Theatre, in 1965, she confirmed her serious-mindedness, first with an elegantly superior Beatrice to Stephens’s battling Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing, then with a thoroughly modern Clea in Shaffer’s Black Comedy, and lastly as Strindberg’s Miss Julie, these two one-act dramas forming a double-bill at Chichester Festival which transferred to the Old Vic in 1966. Her elder son Christopher was born in 1967; her younger, Toby, arrived two years later.
In the midst of this came one of her biggest triumphs, as the Edinburgh schoolmistress Jean Brodie in the Ronald Neame-directed adaptation of Muriel Spark’s novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which resulted in her first Oscar. “After repeatedly stealing other people’s pictures, she now becomes a star in her own right,” said the Mail. 
Coveney argues that she modelled the anti-heroine in part on the “icy temperament and brusque organisational manner” of her Scottish Presbyterian mother Meg (Margaret).
As Margery Pinchwife in Wycherley’s The Country Wife at Chichester in 1969 she seemed as much at home as ever in Restoration comedy. Encouraged, she returned to the Old Vic in 1970 as Mrs Sullen (to Stephens’s Archer) in William Gaskill’s revival of Farquhar’s The Beaux Stratagem. As a London beauty bored by rustic tedium, she made the treasurable most of her disastrous marriage to a drunken squire. When she came to advise a countrywoman to treat her husband’s sore leg “by boning, seasoning and baking it”, her deadpan delivery enriched the line with sly spite.
In Ingmar Bergman’s revival for the National Theatre of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler (Cambridge, 1970, with Stephens as Loevborg), she created as chilly a heroine as any could recall, a glacial malice glittering beneath her politeness.
She won the Variety Club award for best actress as the acidic divorcee Amanda in Coward’s Private Lives (Queen’s, and Globe), playing opposite her husband, Stephens; their success, however, was piquant, drawing on the disintegration of their marriage. As Stephens recalled in his memoir: “It was just how we talked to each other at home.”
He claimed that the couple’s malaise had set in during the filming of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, when she took an amphetamine called Drinamyl, making her “intolerable to live with”, but his affairs – at one point he had three women on the go, one of them their secretary – took a major toll.
A year later, in 1973, ever keen to demonstrate versatility, she played, without a trace of snideness, the title role in Peter Pan (Coliseum), and then Connie Hudson in the sex comedy Snap! (Vaudeville, 1974), a flop that coincided with her final break-up with Stephens; their divorce went through in April 1975, and in June she married the playwright Beverley Cross.
Then, determined “to have a damned good try at a lot of things that I would probably never be cast for in England”, she spent three classical seasons at Stratford, Ontario. There she played Cleopatra in Antony and Cleopatra; Millamant in Congreve’s The Way of the World; Masha in Chekhov’s Three Sisters; Titania and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Queen Elizabeth in Richard III; Rosalind in As You Like It; and Lady Macbeth.
Bolstered by these experiences, back in London in 1979 she took over from Diana Rigg in Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day (Phoenix), returning to Stratford, Ontario, to play Virginia Woolf in Edna O’Brien’s Virginia (seen later at the Haymarket, London), Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing and Masha in The Three Sisters.
In the 1980s her London stage performances indicated a marked preference for modern character rather than for classical acting, starting with Ronald Harwood’s Interpreters (1985).
As a refugee from Warsaw in Stephen Poliakoff’s Coming in to Land (1986) the actress showed National Theatre audiences a sterner and refreshing side to her talent. In Lettice and Lovage (1987), Shaffer’s satire about a stately-home tour guide who embellishes her descriptions with fictions to keep the punters engaged, and gets found out, she revelled in a subversive, eccentric role specially written for her.
If some pointed out that the performance restored some of the semaphoring tricks and vocal mannerisms from earlier days, they were widely welcomed, all the same, and when the show crossed the Atlantic she won a 1990 Tony Award – further proof, if proof were needed, that she excelled at isolated characters whose strangeness generated a funny-peculiar charm.
In 1988, she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, for which she had radiotherapy treatment and optical surgery. Her stage appearances became less frequent in the ensuing decades, but made no less impact for that.
She triumphed, as expected, as Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest (1993, Aldwych), then starred in a string of major Edward Albee productions. In Three Tall Women (1994) at Wyndham’s, she played an autocratic but bedbound elderly woman and then a slightly less aged version of her, joining with two younger incarnations to survey her life. Ten years later, she proved her theatrical powers remained undimmed as the mysterious titular character in Albee’s The Lady From Dubuque.
With more than 50 film credits to her name, only a handful can be mentioned. She first drew praise (and a Bafta nomination) for the crime film Nowhere to Go (1958). She was Oscar-nominated for her portrayal of the flamboyant Aunt Augusta in Travels with My Aunt (1973). 
In 1978 she appeared with Alan Alda, Michael Caine and Jane Fonda in California Suite (1977), in which her performance as an actress who loses out on Oscar night secured her a second Academy Award after The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (for best supporting actress). She was also nominated for Oscars for her roles as Charlotte Bartlett, the chaperone of Helena Bonham Carter in A Room with a View (1986), and as Lady Trentham in Robert Altman’s Gosford Park (2002).
Other notable successes included Oh! What a Lovely War (1968); Death on the Nile (1978); Clash of the Titans (1981); Quartet (1981); Evil Under the Sun (1982); The Missionary (1982); A Private Function (1984); The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (1989); Hook (1991); Sister Act (1992); and Tea with Mussolini (1999).
In the popular The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2012) and its sequel, she joined an illustrious older cast, playing an enterprising former family-help who gets cured of her racism when she is packed off to India for a hip replacement. In My Old Lady (2014) she played a refined elderly sitting tenant in a Parisian apartment whose young American owner grows to admire and like her.
Her television performances included playing a resentful vicar’s wife in A Bed Among the Lentils (part of Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads series), Much Ado About Nothing, Man and Superman, On Approval and Home and Beauty. She was nominated for an Emmy for her performance as Betsey Trotwood in David Copperfield (1999) opposite the future Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe.
“I think there is an accepted way that a face should be, and I’m not like that,” she once said, but audiences begged to differ. A somewhat reluctant celebrity, and seldom enthusiastic newspaper interviewee, she published no diaries or memoir.
According to her son, Chris Larkin, she was “almost terrifyingly sanguine about critics, success, failure. She doesn’t worry at all and simply says you can only do what you do.” It can be accounted one of her undersung successes that despite being in the public eye for more than six decades, she retained an essential, almost regal, mystique to the last.
She was appointed CBE in 1970, DBE in 1990 and CH in 2014 .
Maggie Smith married the actor Robert Stephens in 1967. The marriage was dissolved in 1975, and that year she married Beverley Cross, who died in 1998. She is survived by the two sons from her first marriage, both actors: Chris Larkin and Toby Stephens.  
Dame Maggie Smith, born December 28 1934, died September 27 2024