Maggie Smith, one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, whose award-winning roles ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey,” died on Friday in London. She was 89.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by her family in a statement issued by a publicist. The statement gave no 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 1930s girls’-school teacher who dared to have progressive social views — and a love life. Vincent Canby’s review in The New York Times described her performance as “a staggering amalgam of counterpointed moods, switches in voice levels and obliquely stated emotions, all of which are precisely right.” It brought her 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 had begun coming Ms. Smith’s way in the 1950s, when at 20 she won her first Evening Standard Award. By the turn of the millennium, she had the two Oscars, two Tonys, two Golden Globes, half a dozen Baftas (British Academy of Film and Television Awards) and scores of nominations. Yet she could go almost anywhere unrecognized.
Until “Downton Abbey.”
That series followed the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), his mostly aristocratic family and his troubled household staff at their grand Jacobean mansion as the world around them, between 1912 and 1925, refused to stand still.
After its 2010 British premiere and its 2011 American debut, the show ran six seasons. Its breakout star, from the beginning, was Ms. Smith, playing 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 situation she couldn’t ridicule with withering imperiousness. When her daughter-in-law considered sending a younger relative for a stay in New York, Lady Violet objected: “Oh, I don’t think things are quite that desperate.”
Suddenly, in her mid-70s, Ms. Smith was a megastar.
“It’s ridiculous. I’d led a perfectly normal life until ‘Downton Abbey,’ ” she told Mark Lawson at the B.F.I. and Radio Times Festival in 2017, adding later: “Nobody knew who the hell I was.”
The closest Ms. Smith had come to such visibility was with the Harry Potter movies. She was Minerva McGonagall, the Hogwarts School’s stern but fearless transformation teacher, in seven of the eight films, from “Harry Potter: The Sorceror’s Stone” (2001) to “Harry Potter: The Deathly Hallows Part 2” (2011).
McGonagall, wearing high-necked Victorian-style gowns, a distinctive Scottish brooch, and upswept hair beneath a tall, black witch’s hat, was a striking onscreen presence. Yet Ms. Smith did not find herself constantly pursued in public, except by children.
“A lot of very small people kind of used to say hello to me, and that was nice,” she recalled on “The Graham Norton Show” in 2015. One boy carefully asked her, “Were you really a cat?”
A full obituary will appear soon.
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